The Secrets of the FBI, by Ronald Kessler: Although rather defensive over some the FBI’s mistakes, it starts with Hoover and goes over some of the good and bad points of each director peppered with many humorous anecdotal tales of FBI break-ins gone wrong, like when a cat escaped and they sent agents with night vision out to recapture it, threw it back in the house and wondered why the dog was flipping out over the cat only to find out the next day that it was the wrong cat. Or the time a bus was parked in front of a house to give agents cover for a target house they broke into, after which everyone piled in the bus and drove off, only to find two freaked out pedestrian passengers who boarded without anyone noticing and was now ringing the bus stop bell to be let off the bus filled with black-suited men bearing weapons.

The More Than Complete Action Philosophers, by Fred van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey: A hilarious graphic novel that provides good synopses on ancient, medieval and modern philosophers, including: Thales of Miletus, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Lao Tzu, Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, Epicurus, Epictetus the Stoic, St. Augustine, Bodidharma, Rumi, Thomas Aquinas, Mchiavelli, Isaac Luria: Rabbi of the Mystic Arts, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, George Brekeley, Leibniz, Hume, “Oh no, Rousseau!” sitcom, Jefferson, Immanuel Kant: Epistemological Attorney (God hires him after being indicted as a “transcendental illusion”), Georg Hegel vs. Arthur Schopenhauer, Auguste Comte, Soren Kierkegaard, Marx, “You’re a Good Man John Stuart Mill” Charle Brown comic, Nietzsche, William James, Freud, Jung, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Joseph Campbell, Ayn Rand, “The Foucault Circus,” and Derrida the Deconstructonator.

Hitch-22: A Memoir, by Christopher Hitchens: Turns out the priest Hitchens’ mother committed suicide with was an X-priest and they both had become initiated into a religious following by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the “Beatles Guru.” This, combined with the the way he had to pay a priest who was grumbling about the sanctity of deterring a suicidal adulteress has made me even more confident that his, and the unabashed love he described for his mother — descriptions which bordered so much on Oedipal that I thought I was listening to D. H. Lawrence — has made me more confident in connecting this to his hatred of religion.

Another weird thing is that although a great deal of the book is dedicated to his protest against Vietnam and his first encounters with associates and books in the world Socialist movement. Yet the only reason he gives for being against Vietnam is because the U.S. was aggressively bombing an agrarian state, with no mention of WW2, the French colonies, China, the Korean War, the South Vietnamese, or anything to put the war in context. One could make the same argument he gives for Iraq. In other words, the book has more to do with what he did than why he did it. He does the same thing with Kennedy, completely blaming him solely for the Cuban Missile Crisis as if it had more to do with the United States’ desire to annex a “Banana Republic” rather than prevent a nuclear buildup on it’s front door. No blame whatsoever for the U.S.S.R. (A later chapter says that a review of his work showed that the word he used was, quite surprisingly, not “Banana Republic” but “perhaps”.)

Although he gives some reasonable explanations for being against of the Gulf War, such as the U.S.’s role in the Iraq-Iran war and Bush originally pledging not to defend Kuwait being a signal that Saddam was going to be allowed to take the oil fields but not the country,
the way he moves from goes from opposing the Gulf War with quiet reservations to hating those who support the Iraq War in the same chapter is mentally disjointed, even falling into the same tropes that he would have found to be disgusting propaganda had it been used for the Vietnam war. Had the Gulf War been expanded into a 10-year ouster of Saddam, he no doubt would have felt as vindicated (something he says is the definition of happiness) as if the Iraq War lasted as long as the Gulf War. As it so happened, his transformation from World-Citizen Socialist to American Liberal Hawk coincided with his supporting of a bad war in the guilt of not supporting a good war. Especially strange is the way he insincerely suggests that the Bush Administration and his good pal Paul Wolfowitz were criminally negligent for the massive power outage that hit Iraq and the lack of properly issued vehicale and body armor following Saddam’s fall, yet he nevertheless compares Rumsfeld’s quote about “going to war with the army we have” to his own unconvincing belief that he would have pushed for the Iraq War had Gore been president. Thomas Jones says it best:

More striking than the way in which the content of his opinions has changed, however, is the continuity in the manner in which he has held those opinions. He likes to think of himself as a rational sceptic, but he isn’t really: his views are more visceral than that, his lurches from one deeply held position to the next driven mostly by gut instinct. Fine orator and fluent writer though he is, he’s never been much of an analytical thinker, and his style of argument proceeds more by a series of emphatic, emotive and stylish assertions (he magnificently denounces Argentina’s General Videla as looking ‘like a cretin impersonating a toothbrush’), by appeals to common sense and common feeling, than by logical reasoning.

Masterfully eloquent in his delivery, every appended anecdote scorched with dry British wit, it is very much worth the cost of not being able to interpret some of his phrases to listen to it on audiobook.

Catch 22, by Joseph Heller: I was given this book by a friend even though I wasn’t sure if I was going to read it, but was told by him that the book was so good he had a second copy just so he could lend one out. Apparently I took too long because the last time I was over at his place before the New Year, he announced (not to me specifically) that he had bought another copy of it. Haven’t gotten far in it but the theme of the WWII-set storyline seems to be that in a world gone completely insane, only those feigning illness to get out of the war are completely sane.

Fullmetal Alchemist, by Hiromu Arakawa: A story in a paralel universe where alchemy replaces science. Two brothers, Edward and Alphonse Elric, attempt to break alchemy’s ultimate taboo and use the art to bring back their dead mother. The act pulls Edward’s leg into another dimension while Alphonse is completely swallowed up. Waking up, Edward finds a tortured, half-constructed organ mesh where his mother should be and his brother gone. Using alchemy once again, he sacrifices his arm to anchor Alphonse’s soul to a body of armor. In grand steam punk style, his friend/love interest Winry then creates a metallic arm and leg for him, the first of which he often transforms into a blade using alchemy. Alphonse’s fearsome look is contrasted by his a polite, gentle character, and his disappearing memories later make him wonder if he really existed before he was transposed into the metallic body. Edward is shorter than average and a lot of comic relief comes from how extremely touchy he is about it, along with the running gag that everyone they meet naturally thinks that Alphonse is the “Fullmetal Alchemist.”

The manga reminds me a lot of Rumiko Takahashi, and she does say that Rumiko is one of her inspirations. Two different television series were born from the manga: the first one moves in a different direction once it catches up with the manga and the second one basically rewrites a bunch of the episodes for the first season and then continues with the manga telling of the story. I had watched the movie a couple of years ago even though and enjoyed it even though it acted as an ending for the first series. The movie was set in our own universe right before Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, with the plot involving the Nazi-connected Thule Society trying to open a portal into the other world.

As for the manga, it had a wonderfully massive ending that concluded the story. That is one thing I’ve always appreciated about the Japanese manga artist. They may have no problem carbon copying themes from every other manga/anime in existence (Negima!, for example, is a now-typical “harem” comedy about a 10-year-old magician with a talking ferret that has 31 schoolgirls “almost” kissing him, including: a ninja, a vampire, a robot, a ghost, a half-demon, a web idol, and a time traveling Martian). But for their lack of originality, the Japanese manga artist at least knows how to end a story and move on, whereas no cartoon in the U.S. can ever change anything on their last comic/episode on the chance it might get picked up again.

Hedge Knight II: Sworn Sword, by G. R. R. Martin. Before writing the stupendous Song of Ice and Fire series, Martin wrote for The Twilight Zone and the CBS drama Beauty and the Beast. Hedge Knight is the story of a not-too-bright knight-for-hire and his younger, bald squire, the literate but still childish “Egg.” Like Game of Thrones, Martin does a great job immersing the reader into his world and the lushly colored art is spectacular. As always, even the most minor of characters is an interesting three-dimensional medieval personality and the plot has plenty of great plot twists.

The First Man in Rome, by Colleen McCullough: This is the first in a series of extremely long novels, starting with the history of the Social War in first-century B.C. Rome and ending with Antony and Cleopatra. The first novel chronicles the lives of Gaius Marius, a powerful man without prestige, and Sulla, a nobleman without money or power before their alliance and eventual conflict, which eventually broadens out to the Social War between Rome and Italy, which in turn precipitates the Civil War between Caesar and the Republic. McCullough does a great job combining a character-driven novel with an amazingly immerse background in Roman history, complete with appended glossary. The immense novel lengths of McCullough is not the only thing she shares in common with George R. R. Martin. Like Martin, she gets the characterization right, masterfully blending modern psychological traits with ancient cultural mores.

The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire, by Matt Taibbi: Working under Rolling Stone, the only magazine that will allow Taibbi to say “FUCK YOU” to Mike Bloomberg, Matt goes undercover, pretending to be both a Fundamentalist Christian in one of John Hagee’s Megachurch cells and a 9/11 Truth follower to show how modern politics has polarized political groups into conspiratorial cults. Probably the only author I know who non-nonchalantly referred to himself as a drug addict without any explanation or elaboration. Taibbi is also surprisingly bad at his undercover roles, explaining that at one point he told his fellow Megachurch supporters that his Dad had died in some clown-related incident… and that wasn’t even something he came up with on the spur of the moment. The undercover work actually seems to yield very little in damning material about the individuals he meets, who you end up feeling sorry for more than anything, and so most of the book is him extrapolating on conversations he had with them in order to explain his own points. Surprisingly dull for such a talented writer.

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America, by Matt Taibbi: A must-read for those looking into a non-partisan explanation of the financial crisis of 2008. He explains how the Tea Party was “top-down media con” initiated by CNBC’s Rick Santelli when he denounced not the huge bailout of the banks but rather the relatively small bailout for people facing foreclosure. (The name goes back to Ron Paul’s 2007 Boston Tea Party fund raising commemoration, but that’s like comparing the commercialized rape-fest of Woodstock ’99 to its original). He describes Alan Greenspan as an economist who became famous for being famous, a social ladder climber who got in with Ayn Rand to help himself get into elite circles and then abandoned her Libertarian philosophy to join the Federal Reserve as a corporatist. Taibbi explains how the banks repackaged securitized loans as Collateralized Debt Obligations (and in the process took the loan originators off the hook), then cut these bundled loans into “tranches”, convinced the rating agencies who depend on the banks for their living to give them a Triple A rating, and then insured them through credit default swaps so that neither sellers like AIG needed capitalization, nor buyers needed to own the insured assets.

Prey, by Michael Chrichton: Nanomachines that are evolving into hive behavior begins killing the scientists who created them. The protagonist, an out-of-work scientist who helped develop the nanomachines but now a stay-at-home Dad, goes to the Nevada desert lab where his wife works to help bring them under control while at the same time worrying about whether his wife is having an affair with his former friend and team leader. Decent novel. Follows a kind of horror movie format. The science seemed well researched, as opposed to say, Timeline, where Chrichton emphatically maintained was based on parallel universes and NOT time travel before ending the story with the protagonist changing the past in his own timeline.

Next, by Michael Chrichton: This is the last novel that was published before Chrichton died. This story is about transgenic animals being given the powers of human intelligence and speech. Genetic companies wage legal and covert battles. One of the main characters, a biotech researcher, is forced to adopt a child-like chimp that has his genetic material and his wife creates a fictitious genetic disease on Wikipedia to explain his appearance at school. The family must deal with bullies and the genetic corporation trying to eliminate him to destroy evidence of unauthorized experiments. There are several other plot threads, some which run into the main one, and others that go nowhere and just die out, and Chrichton explains in an interview appended to the audiobook that he did this to emulate the way genes themselves evolve.

Rethinking the Gospel Sources: From Proto-Mark to Mark, by Delbert Royce Burkett: This book has been nothing short of revolutionary for me. I had of course, long believed that there was more than one earlier prototype for the Gospel of Mark, but Burkett’s theory made me change my mind on two things that I never would have believed possible: that the Griesbech Hypothesis was partially true and that Jesus’ resurrection appearance at the end of Mark’s gospel, which most modern Bibles now mark off as a late addition, is actually the original ending.

The Griesbach Hypothesis is a very old rival to the Two Source Hypothesis saying Matthew and Luke had used Mark. The theory instead argued that Mark’s gospel is actually a combination of Matthew and Luke. There was no shortage of evidence against the Griesbach hypothesis: Mark’s language was cruder, it’s plot less grandiose, and tons of gospel content would have had to have been exercised from Matthew and Luke for no discernible reason. I had studied the Griesbach Hypothesis for my thesis and wrote against one Griesbach author who had tried to show that Mark had been switching back and forth between Matthew and Luke as he went along. By looking at some of the examples, I showed that the “alternations” were ethereal: every instance of “Mark copying Luke” had some Matthean language in it and every instance of “Matthew copying Mark” had some Lukan language in it. But I rememeber thinking how weird it was that Matthew and Luke always seemed to take a different verse from Mark than the other.

As it turns out, that is because both the Two Source Hypothesis and the Griesbach hypothesis are true: Matthew and Luke had respectively copied from two different versions of Proto-Mark, called Proto-Mark A and Proto-Mark B, but Mark’s gospel itself was born of the incestuous union of those same two sources. The effect was that while Matthew and Luke had much longer gospels than Mark because they combined different stories, Mark had longer stories than Matthew or Luke because he combined verses from different versions of the same story. It was hard to believe at first: I typically assumed gospel variants expanded like branches on a tree: generally moving apart from one another, but this hypothesis showed that Proto-Mark had been expanded by two different authors and then later recombined back into Mark.

The second miracle, convincing me that both Proto-Mark and Mark actually had a resurrection appearance sequence at its conclusion, came from showing that Mark’s ending had material that came from both Proto-Mark A/Matthew and Proto-Mark B/Luke, meaning that either it came about from Mark’s combining process or it coincidentally went through the same exact process at a later date. I had already known that Mark’s ending referenced Luke, but that only made me assume that the ending was an attempt to harmonize the earlier gospel with Luke’s Presbyter tradition. Instead, it seems a later editor cut out Mark’s resurrection sequence, something I had only seen Biblical literalists believe. The absence of a resurrection appearance made sense for Proto-Mark because early Christians probably would have believed the resurrection would happen at the upcoming Apocalypse, not before it, or so it seemed. Burkett even showed that textual parallels within Mark’s second, shorter ending with the earliest version of Proto-Mark proved that it based on Proto-Mark’s ending, basically meaning BOTH endings involving the resurrection appearance are authentic.

Proto-Mark -> Proto-Mark A & Proto-Mark B -> Mark -> Mark with Deleted Ending -> Mark with Proto-Mark’s Ending

Proto-Mark A -> Matthew

Proto-Mark B -> Luke

But why would a Christian cut out the resurrection appearance and leave Jesus’ tomb empty at the gospel’s conclusion? I thought that the most likely explanation was that it was edited by a Gnostic since the Gnostics generally eschewed apocalypticism, perhaps as a reaction against the messianic failures of the Bar Kohba Revolt. And, as it turned out, I had already accepted the plausible explanation from Helmut Koester that Morton Smith’s Secret Mark was a third-generation gospel edited by a baptismal sect since both Matthew and Luke lacked a verse from Mark making a literary connection between baptism and martyrdom. I even built on Koester’s hypothesis: Secret Mark had a story very similar to the resurrection of Lazarus from John’s gospel following the bathing narrative and the Gnostic-themed second layer of John appeared to be Valentinian. There was a branch of Valentinians known as the Marcosians, named after their leader Mark, who also happened to teach about a second baptism of Christ for perfection apart from the baptism of Jesus for the forgiveness of sins. Who better to write a Gnostic version of the gospel centered on baptismal resurrection under the name Mark?

But it was not to be. Burkett dismissed the existence of Secret Mark for lack of evidence and an insufficient amount of material. I went back and started to review Secret Mark with a mind to contradict him, but as it turned out, a writing expert had recently determined it to be a forgery and an old Da Vinci Code-like novel had since been discovered telling of plot involving a forged “lost gospel” that had been “discovered” at the Mar Saba monastery near Bethlehem, the same monastery Morton Smith had “found” the letter supposedly written by Clement of Alexandria quoting Secret Mark. Ironically, I had originally been skeptical of Secret Mark, even writing to a Biblical scholar that the dishonesty and cynicism in the letter didn’t seem to reflect the personality of Clement (one of the few theologians I kind of liked), but got a reply that it did reflect him. The fact that “Secret Mark” made Jesus look gay and that Clement’s letter mysteriously disappeared soon after Smith “found” it also made me skeptical, but I started to question that skepticism when Bart D. Ehrman claimed to have talked to someone from the monastery who said they had seen it and knew how it disappeared (although Ehrman himself remained unsure). I finally accepted Secret Mark as real when I read Koester’s argument dismissing Smith’s assumptions that the resurrection story was historical and linked to actual homosexual magical rituals used by Jesus. Although Burkett didn’t even mention it, an examination of his work on Proto-Mark also destroyed one of the main pillars of Secret Mark: the scene of Jesus entering Jericho and then leaving the city without doing anything inside it, long assumed by Bible scholars to prove the story in Jericho from Secret Mark was edited out, which is shown by Burkett’s work to be a byproduct of Mark combining his two sources. Thus, a late layer of Mark is disproven by the same process proving no less than three earlier layers of Mark.

The Panarion of St. Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis, translated by Philip R. Amidon, S.J. (Jesuit): Driven by jealousy for not making Barkett’s discovery myself, I attempted to prove that Marcion’s “Gospel of the Lord” constituted an editorial layer in between Proto-Mark B and Luke, but came up with mixed results. Before I knew about Epiphanius’ quotations from Marcion’s gospel, I had gone through Luke and bracketed out what I thought was an earlier Marcionite gospel that was canonized into Luke. Although I did find a few examples from Epiphanius of what I think are verses that pre-date Luke, a lot of the content missing from Marcion actually appears in Mark and Matthew, leading to troubling conclusion that some verses really were “cut out” as Tertullian and most biblical scholars assume, and not only that but cut out for no good reason (as even Epiphanius mentions). Weirdest of all is that Epiphanius’ version has the physical resurrection of Jesus after he himself said Marcion only believed in a spiritual resurrection.

Another conclusion I came to from the comparison is that I believe Proto-Mark did in fact have a copy of the Sermon on the Mount but chose to pepper his action-oriented gospel with a few references rather than copy the whole thing down. Most scholars, including Burkett, believe the Sermon comes from Q, but the “Blessings and Curses” from it are very different from the Cynic Wisdom teachings that make up Q, plus both Matthew and Luke place the sermon in the context of a mountain, proving that the Sermon’s source was not a “sayings gospel” like Q.

Games That I am Playing

New Super Mario Bros. Wii

This game is amazingly challenging for the Wii era of the casual gamer, not to mention a game that could be essentially classified as a “party game” since it can boast 4 players, but having multiple players in a Mario game is the very pinnacle of nostalgic gratification. Having a second player can prove advantageous since you can cooperate a times, such as jumping on your partner’s head to gain altitude, but it also often trips you up as players run into one another and accidentally killings are very common. Given that the challenge level is so high, one would expect Princess Toadstool/Peach should have been one of the four main characters, but opting to keep the nostalgia centered completely on Super Mario Bros. 1 (rather than 2), Player 4 is just a second clone of Toad in another color, which is pretty pathetic given the expanded array of Mario characters– even Luigi has a princess girlfriend I think. The final battle against Bowser is also engineered to bring back nostalgic memories of the original castle-battle of SMB1 where Mario had to run under the jumping Bowser and flip a switch that dropped him into a pool of acid below, though it is spiced up with a final final battle against a magically-enlarged King Koopa. The game is played with the WiiMote held sideways to emulate the controller of the 8-bit NES. However, the decision to do this is met with a massive design flaw:

The A button puts your character in a bubble, which is useful if you make a mistake and are about to die, but is excruciating when you accidentally hit it and are the only one alive on the screen, because it automatically takes you back to the beginning of the level with whatever power-ups you had lost. It’s also easy to accidentally hit the power button, which causes everything unsaved up to that point to be lost. Either one button or the other got pushed accidentally dozens and dozens of times and usually at the worst possible times.

Music That I Am Listening To

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

I had heard that Trent Reznor had gotten involved with another band called How to Destroy Angels, but I didn’t really like the grating, demonic noise that indeed seemed designed to rupture the conscious mind of some ethereal beings. As it turned out, Trent had gotten married and the project was centered on his Filipino wife, Mariqueen Maandig, who quit her band West Indian Girl and joined her husband and Atticus on creating “Angels.” As if Trent getting married wasn’t shocking enough, he also has a son. Like Devin Townsend, Trent seemed to have lost some of his inspiration with With Teeth and Year Zero when he decided to get sober, but then he teamed up with Atticus Ross to create the four-cd instrumental epic, Ghosts I-IV, my favorite Nine Inch Nails album to date. Although he had talked about making a sequel to Year Zero and Ghosts, Trent eventually decided that NIN should “go away for a little while” and went on his “Waving Goodbye Tour.” However, the two soundtracks he has done with Atticus Ross, The Social Network, and the 3-cd behemoth, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is nothing short of a follow-up to Ghosts with another name on it. Beginning with a cover of “Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin and ending with a cover of the Bryan Ferry song, “Is Your Love Strong Enough?”, under the moniker of How to Destroy Angels, the movie is bound to bring Reznor and Ross far more commercial success than had it been released as a Nine Inch Nails album.

December 25 is not Jesus’ birthday. Christmas is based on the winter solstice. In a great many religions from the Old World, the solstice marked the day that the vegetation god died, typically by being crucified on a tree, causing all the earth’s vegetation to die with him only to be reborn on the spring equinox. Thus the death and resurrection of the god symbolized the death and resurrection of vegetation throughout the year.

None of the gospels give an exact date for the birth of Jesus. The Gospel of Luke mentions shepherds out tending sheep in the late evening, which some have taken to mean it wouldn’t be in the winter since sheep would have been locked up. Luke puts his birth at 6 A.D., a symbolic year for Jewish resistance as Luke specifically makes reference to the Roman tax census that triggered a revolt by Judas the Galilean (a Zealot figure who probably inspired Judas Iscariot, seeing how his surname is a reference to Sicarii assassins). The Gospel of Matthew tells the story of the Three Magi visiting Herod the Great on their way to meet baby Jesus, but Herod didn’t die until 4 B.C., a full 10 years before the tax census.

Around 200 A.D., St. Clement of Alexandria gave three different dates various churches used to celebrate Jesus’ birthday. None of them were December 25. Another Alexandrian theologian named Origen mocked Roman celebrations of birth anniversaries, dismissing them as “pagan” practices.

Tertullian, the first Latin father to mention the Trinity, in particular condemned decorating the home with boughs of evergreen, saying:

“Let them over whom the fires of hell are imminent, affix to their posts, laurels doomed presently to burn: to them the testimonies of darkness and the omens of their penalties are suitable. You are a light of the world, and a tree ever green. If you have renounced temples, make not your own gate a temple.”

Even the 2,600-year-old Biblical prophet Jeremiah condemned a ritual seemingly identical to Christmas, saying: “For the customs of the peoples are worthless; they cut a tree out of the forest, and a craftsman shapes it with his chisel. They adorn it with silver and gold; they fasten it with hammer and nails so it will not totter” (10:3-4).

The first Christian linking Jesus’ birth to Christmas comes from an Egyptian in the mid-300s, and by the late 360s, the Donatists, an African Christian sect that broke away from the “traitors” who allied themselves with Emperor Constantine, accepted Christmas on December 25 but not the Epiphany on January 6.

Some time during the Middle Ages, the Christmas tree became associated with the tree from the Garden of Eden, called the “Paradise Tree,” and decorated with apples, a concept hardly alien from the original pre-Hebrew myth. The first recorded Christmas tree was erected in the house of a military brotherhood in Estonia in the mid-1400s. A Bremen guild chronicle of 1570 records how a small tree decorated with apples, nuts, dates, pretzels and paper flowers was put up in the guild house for the members’ children. Most Christmas trees were found only in churches until the 1500s, but even in the mid-1800s, they were still controversial enough to bring threats against Henry Schwan of Cleveland Ohio, the first American pastor to erect a Christmas Tree in his church. The Puritans likewise condemned Christmas, with Oliver Cromwell outright banning “the heathen traditions” of Christmas carols, decorated trees and any joyful expression that desecrated “that sacred event.” Martin Luther tried replacing the bearer of gifts with Christkindl, the “Christ Child”, but the name was only transferred over to St. Nikolaos, which is why Santa Claus is also known as “Kriss Kringle.” Decorating the tree with expensive-for-the-time candles comes from the 1700s and by the 1800s Christmas trees were showing up in Germany’s schools, inns, and military hospitals.

The winter solstice was important because in ancient times because there was little food and starvation was common, so the solstice was meant to be the last feast celebration before everyone had to hole themselves up for winter. Most cattle were slaughtered to save on food, so the solstice feast was one of the few times anyone could eat as much meat as they wanted. Wine and beer stored for fermentation was opened up at this time. The reason Christmas Eve holds particular importance is because the pre-Romanized day began in the evening previous, just as the Jewish Sabbath does today.

In Roman times, the solstice festival was named Saturnalia after the god of time and agriculture. According to the third-century Neo-Platonic philosopher Porphyry, Saturnalia occurred near the winter solstice because the sun enters Capricorn, the astrological house of Saturn, at that time. The holiday was celebrated with a sacrifice at at Saturn’s temple and a public banquet followed by private gift-giving.

There was a carnival atmosphere, complete with costumes and role-playing, a time when social norms could be overturned: gambling was permitted, no declaration of war could be made, and masters provided table service for their slaves. Both citizen and slave wore the cone-shaped pileius cap, representing the wearer as a freedman. The reversal of social roles aspect of the holiday was inherited from the Athenian festival of Kronia, named after Kronos (linked to the root word “chron,” as in “chronology” or “chronicle”), the Greek equivalent of Saturn, although the Greek holiday was actually celebrated in the summer.

Wikipedia says that:

The day of gift-giving was the Sigillaria on December 23. Because gifts of value would mark social status contrary to the spirit of the season, these were often the pottery or wax figurines called sigillaria made specially for the day, candles, or “gag gifts”, of which Augustus was particularly fond. In his many poems about the Saturnalia, Martial names both expensive and quite cheap gifts, including writing tablets, dice, knucklebones, moneyboxes, combs, toothpicks, a hat, a hunting knife, an axe, various lamps, balls, perfumes, pipes, a pig, a sausage, a parrot, tables, cups, spoons, items of clothing, statues, masks, books, and pets. Gifts might be as costly as a slave or exotic animal. Patrons or “bosses” might pass along a gratuity (sigillaricium) to their poorer clients or dependents to help them buy gifts. Some emperors were noted for their devoted observance of the Sigillaria.

The revelries and dropping of social status of Saturnalia were supposed to reflect the conditions of the lost mythical age, when Saturn, or Kronos, reigned over the world during a limitless bounty of the earth without labor in a state of social egalitarianism known as the Golden Age, the same as the Biblical Eden.

The Talmud ascribes the origins of this festival to Adam, who saw that the days were getting shorter and became afraid that the world was returning to the chaos and emptiness that existed before creation because of his sin, and so fasted for 8 days, representing the 8 days between Saturnalia and the winter solstice. When the days grew long again, he realized it was the earth’s natural cycles, and so made 8 days of celebration, representing the 8 days between the soltice and the festival called Kalend. Only later was the festival turned into something pagan, according to the text.

Christmas day also marked the first day of the year for the Anglo-Saxons, the German tribes that invaded Great Britain in the 400s and ruled the newly dubbed Angle-land (England) until the Norman conquest in 1066. Around 730 A.D., the venerable Latin monk Bede wrote:

They began the year with December 25, the day some now celebrate as Christmas; and the very night to which we attach special sanctity they designated by the heathen term Modraniht, that is, the mothers’ night — a name bestowed, I suspect, on account of the ceremonies they performed while watching this night through.

In Germany, the Yule festival was celebrated for 12 days from late December to early January on a date determined by the lunar Germanic calendar. The legendary Ynglinga Saga, written by the Old Norse Icelandic poet Snorri Sturloson in 1225, mentions a Yule feast being celebrated as early as 840. In the Saga of Hákon the Good, Snorri gives a vivid description of the German festival:

It was ancient custom that when sacrifice was to be made, all farmers were to come to the heathen temple and bring along with them the food they needed while the feast lasted. At this feast all were to take part of the drinking of ale. Also all kinds of livestock were killed in connection with it, horses also; and all the blood from them was called hlaut [sacrificial blood], and hlautbolli, the vessel holding the blood; and hlautteinar, the sacrificial twigs [aspergills]. These were fashioned like sprinklers, and with them were to be smeared all over with blood the pedestals of the idols and also the walls of the temple within and without; and likewise the men present were to be sprinkled with blood. But the meat of the animals was to be boiled and served as food at the banquet. Fires were to be lighted in the middle of the temple floor, and kettles hung over them. The sacrificial beaker was to be borne around the fire, and he who made the feast and was chieftain, was to bless the beaker as well as all the sacrificial meat.

The first toast was to be drunk to Odin “for victory and power to the king,” the second toast to Njörðr and Freyr “for good harvests and for peace,” the third toast was to be a beaker drunk to the king himself, with final toasts to the memory of departed kinsfolk.

Children would fill their boots with carrots, straw, or sugar and place them near the chimney for Odin’s flying gray horse, Sleipnir, to eat. Black ravens would listen from the chimney hole in the house to figure out which children were naughty and which were nice before the large white-bearded Odin would enter and reward the good children by replacing Sleipnir’s food with gifts or candy. Thor, whose home was in the snowy “Northland”, also rode a flying chariot pulled by two white goats, Cracker and Gnasher, and come down the chimney holes directly into the fire, which was his natural element.

St. Nikolaos’ popularity skyrocketed during Medieval times. The propensity of paintings of Nikolaos was matched only by the Virgin Mary, with almost 400 churches dedicated to him in England during the late Middle Ages. The earlier Yule-themed traits of Odin and Thor passed on to the German Sinterklaas since the Feast of St. Nikolaos was on December 6. This may be related to the fact that the 6th of each month was considered the birthday of the goddess Artemis, the same goddess many of the temples that St. Nikolaos had destroyed was dedicated to. After the Protestant Reformation, Nikolaos’ popularity dwindled in the west, except in the Netherlands. The image of Santa being a fat man comes from the Dutch-American poet Clement Moore in 1823, although Coca Cola ads helped trim his wild nature beard and dropped the smoking pipe.

St. Nikolaos was originally from Myra in Asia Minor, but his remains were taken to Mari in southern Italy in 1087, and by the late 1400s the city was in control of Spain, which was part of the Moorish Empire of African-Arab Muslims. This is why in the mid-1800s, Dutch folklore described the companion of Sinterklaas, “Zwarte Pieten”, or “Black Petes,” as little Moorish children. These “helper elves” were said to navigate the steam boat that took Sinterklaas from Spain to the Netherlands and took the role of the black crows in listening from the chimney holes and stuffing presents down the ones who had good children. Sinterklaas’s giant bag contained not just candy for nice children but a chimney sweep’s broom to spank naughty children, and some of the older Sinterklaas songs even say the bag was used to carry naughty children back to Spain. In Belgium, “Black Petes” still dress up in colorful moorish clothing and scatter pepper nuts, spice nuts, and special Christmas candies called “strooigoed” to those who ran into Sinterklass as he went around town.

The relation between Sinterklaas and Black Pete also mirrors the relationship between Amoo Nowruz (“Uncle New Day”), a white-bearded “Father Time” figure who brings gifts on the eve of the Spring Equinox, and Hajji Firuz, little black-faced, red-suited harbingers of the Persian New Year. These soot-covered tambourine players are believed to come from the tradition of the “Mir-Norowzi,” a comical figure that was paraded around the city and given the power of being king for five days.

Left: Black Pete and Sinterklaas; Right: Hajji Firuz

The red clothes and soot-covered faces and red clothes of the Hajji Firuz apparently goes back to the red-dressed fire-keepers of the Zoroastrians, who at the last Tuesday of the year, was sent by the Zoroastrian priests to spread the news about the arrival of the New Year and call on the people to renew their lives by burning their old items in the fire. The dualistic religion of Zoroastrianism seems to have contributed to the concept of armies of angels and demons doing battle with one another in Christianity since nothing in the Old Testament gives the Judaic Satan from Job that kind of power or authority. And in fact, other Alpine folktales tell of Sinterklass’ companion being the devil, who was shacked to him and made his slave, which fostered the concept of the satyr-like Krampus of Austrian lore. Sources from Germanic Europe identify Black Pete and the Sinterklaas’ demonic slave as being one and the same.

Like Batman, Nikolaos the Confessor used the inheritance from his tragically deceased parents to help the needy. Although Santa passing out candy can be traced back to Odin, the tradition is more popularly linked with the legend of St. Nikolaos sneaking golden coins into the homes of three impoverished families through the windows in order to prevent the desperate families from having to sell their daughters into prostitution for food. Other 11th-century legends tell how he was able to identify a butcher who murdered three children (or inn residents) and was trying to sell their butchered remains as ham, and then resurrected the children. Another legend says that after convincing sailors taking wheat to Emperor Constantine to donate some to the famine-hit people in the city of Mysa that they would not suffer for it, the sailors found that the wheat weighed the same after arriving at Constantinople. Another legend says that Nikolaos set sail for Jerusalem, but after having a Satanic dream, he prophecized a storm and then, a la Jesus, halted the storm and resurrected a sailor who had been blown off a mast. In Jerusalem, church doors magically opened for him, but having not stollen Jesus’ bit enough, he went into the desert to pray but was called back to Mysa so that he could walk through the church doors at just the right time to fulfill a vision given to one of the church elders that the next bishop should be the next person to next walk into the church.

Although St. Nikolaos is not listed among the debaters at the famed Council of Nicaea, there is another legend that he passionately debated with the theologian Arius over whether Jesus was one and the same in God or a creation of God. Arius argued that the title “Son of God” insinuated inferiority to the Father, saying, “What argument then allows, that He who is from the Father should know His own parent by comprehension? For it is plain that for that which hath a beginning to conceive how the Unbegun is, or to grasp the idea, is not possible.”

And for that, jolly ol’ Saint Nick bitch-slapped him.

Nikolaos was kicked out from the council and Constantine threw him in prison, so says the legend, but then Jesus and the (now official) Mother of God vindicated him. In dreams, of course. The dreams brought the priests and bishops to Constantine begging to let pimp daddy Santa out of prison, which Constantine did after he saw Nikolaos produce both gospel and bishop garments from within his cell. So I guess the lesson here is it is completely all right to resort to violence to prove abstract theological points that even Constantine loathed.

Another similar legend says that Nikolaos helped stop one of Constantine’s armies from sacking the city and then saved three generals from being executed by appearing in a dream to Constantine, who rewarded the three men with golden gospels and incense burners, making St. Nick the patron saint of the falsely accused.

The afore-mentioned 13th-century Icelandic poet Snorri credits the 10th-century King Haakon I of Norway with being the first to combine the Yule festival with Christmas. Although Haakon kept his Christian religion secret at first, he eventually wielded enough power to request a bishop and priests from England to convert the country. By the 1200s or early 1300s, Yule became equated with Christmas, with The Grettis Saga saying that all Christians fasted from meat the day before Yule in preparation of the feast.

In the 1100s A.D., a marginal note written by a Syrian Biblical commentator, Dionysius bar-Salibi, said that Christmas had been moved from January 6 to December 25 so that it fell on the same date as the pagan Sol Invictus, the Roman version of the Zoroastrian-inspired sun god Mithras that Constantine had worshiped. His birthday was also December 25. Macrobius, one of the last fifth-century Latin authors not to convert to Christianity, said that the proximity of the Saturnalia to the winter solstice led to an exposition of solar monotheism, the belief that Sol Invictus ultimately encompasses all divinities as one.

Some Biblical scholars have suggested that the date for Christmas was actually determined by calculating the date back 9 months from Passover to the day of his conception, the Annunciation, under the assumption that early Christians were following a Jewish tradition that creation (the Nativity) and redemption (the Crucifixion) occurred at the same time, but Passover and the Annunciation are also derived from the Spring Equinox, or Easter.

The Canaanite fall harvest was changed by the Israelites into Succoth, when they were to move in booths in remembrance of the Exodus, and the Canaanite New Year festivals became Rah ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur, the day of repentance. The Semitic early spring festivals which celebrated the birth of the new lamb became historicized into the Passover, when the blood of lambs was to be put on doorposts.

Even the very minor celebration of Hanukkah probably only showed up on Jewish calendars to provide some kind of a substitute for the winter festival of their neighbors. As David Frum points out, the Pharisee sect that eventually became Orthodox Judaism was actually in contention with the Maccabbees who miraculously held out against the Syrians by the power of divinely enduring lamp oil since the Maccabees not only took over throne of Jerusalem but also the priesthood, breaking the Biblical law that only Levites could be priests. Since the whole rebellion was based around having to sacrifice against the rules of the Bible, it was understandably a controversy. (Not to mention the fact that the Maccabees allied against the Syrians with the Romans, the same guys who eventually burned down the Temple and put an end to Jewish sacrifice forever.)

The name Easter is based on the Saxon goddess Eostre, which is also related to the word “east” because the sun rises in the east, representing the resurrection of the sunlight. She is also equivalent to the Greek Aphrodite and the Roman Venus, whose lover Adonis is also crucified to a tree and was resurrected in the Spring. Fertility symbols such as the highly reproductive bunny and the egg became associated the rebirth of new life that comes in the spring.

In Norse mythology, the vegetation god Baldr (of Baldur’s Gate fame) is killed by a dart made from mistletoe and, like just like Jesus in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemuis, goes to Hel(l) to be resurrected during the Norse Apocalypse, called Ragnarok. Baldr had visions of his own death, as did his mother Frigg, wife to Odin, so Frigg forced all things on the earth to vow not to hurt Baldr except for the mistletoe, so of course, mistletoe became his kryptonite. After being shot by a mistletoe dart by his blind brother Hodr, who is sometimes guided by Loki, Frigg made an arrangement with the queen of the underworld, Hel, to release Baldr if everything in the world wept for him, but a female giant named Thokk, which some sources say was Loki in disguise, refused to weep for him, and thus prevented his resurrection.

Mistletoe is actually a parasite that grows off the branches from bird droppings and thrives during the winter, making it a suitable scapegoat for the destruction of vegetation in the winter. Pre-Christian Europe viewed mistletoe as a representation of divine male fertility, possibly because its berries look like semen. Somewhere along the line this turned into kissing under the mistletoe.

The weeping for Baldr also mirrors the ceremonial “weeping for Tammuz,” which many women from Jerusalem did during the 7th century B.C., much to the prophet Ezekiel’s own chagrin (8:14). The symbol of Tammuz was the Tau cross, from which we get the letter T from. In Sumerian times, he was known as Dumuzi (literally “Good Son”), the Crucified Bread and Beer God who rose on Easter and was known as both “Shepherd” and “Fisherman.”

Sumerian Cylinder From Nippur linking the plowing of grain with the Tau cross.

Dumuzi’s lion-riding wife Inanna was known in the Akkadian language as Ishtar, which is probably related etymologically with Eostre. In Canaan she was known as Asherah, and the Old Testament violently condemns those who worshipped her Asherah poles which symbolized the Tree of Life on which her lover was crucified on. The “Sacred Marriage” held between Dumuzi and Inanna was the subject of much erotic Sumerian poetry, which is mirrored in the Biblical Song of Solomon. There are several myths concerning Dumuzi’s tragic death, but the longest one involves him being taken by demons while sitting beneath a tree and then hung on a stake in the netherworld. A Mesopotamian cylinder seal dated between 2320 and 2150 B.C. shows a multi-horned Inanna welcoming Dumuzi back from the dead from the bottom of a tree. Sumerian statues of Inanna also look very much like the ancient “Venus figurines” like the “Venus of Willendorf,” earth mother figurines discovered throughout all of the Old World and dated as far back as 27,000 years ago.

The Babylonians also celebrated the New Year Zagmuk festival of sowing barley in March/April, complete with the Christmas traditions of exchanging gifts, carnival processions, twelve-day feasts, and the staged re-enactment of the Enuma Elish creation myth. Each year as winter arrived, it was believed that the ancient seawater and freshwater monsters of chaos who gave birth to all the gods tried to slay their creations, and so in turn, the freshwater Apsu was tamed by the Promethean god Ea (or Enki) while it was the head god of the Babylonian pantheon, Ba’al Marduk, who battled and slew his primordeal wife Tiamat, before fashioning her corpse into the known world. Tiamat, who in Sumerian myths was Nammu, the great mother of both the universe and humankind, is probably another incarnation of the primordeal “Venus” earth mother. Thus, the Babylonian creation myth apparently represents the replacement of the far more ancient matrimonial religion with that of the patriarchal storm god.

The king of Babylon acted out the part of Marduk in the ceremonial New Years play. On the 10th day of the ceremony, he would enact the Sacred Marriage rite with his spouse or a celebate high priestess. In some versions of the story, Marduk is killed by Tiamat and then saved by his son Nabu, the god of writing, so in the enactment of the ritual, the king’s life was to be forfeited as well. However, a prisoner was usually used as a scapegoat for the king, and just ot make it fair, a different prisoner was set free under some twisted sense of “balance.” Philo tells of a similar story of a madman named “Carabbas” dressed up and hailed as a mock king, and it is this story combined with the ancient myth of the sacrificed king that inspired the story of Pontius Pilate releasing Barabbas because of a non-existent Jewish custom of releasing a prisoner that the Romans would certainly never had honored even if it did exist. The tradition of the “mock king” holds parallels with some of the other cultural Christmas traditions as it follows the same themes as the dropping rank in Saturnalia and the five-day rule of the Mir-Norowzi. Even in late medieval England, St. Nicholas’ Day parishes held Yuletide “boy bishop” celebrations in which young men performed the functions of priests and bishops and were allowed to boss around their elders.

The myth of Hodr blindly slaying Baldr is mirrored in the apocryphal Book of Jasher in which the antediluvian king Lamech blindly shoots Cain with an arrow by the malevolent direction of his son Tubal-Cain, angering Lamech enough so that he then turned and killed his son Tubal-Cain in frustration. The story of Cain and Abel itself is based on an earlier Sumerian myth about two brothers, Summer and Winter, contending which of their sacrifices was more appealing to their father Enlil, and like the story of Cain (“Metal Smith”) and Abel (a possible pun on “Herdsman”), one is a farmer and one a shepherd, highlighting the ancient conflict between city farmers and nomadic shepherds. Just as Cain represented the city farmer and Abel the shepherd, Tubal-Cain is said in Genesis to have forged the first tools in bronze and iron while his brother Jubal was the father of the harp and flute for the “jubilee.” Just as Romulus slew Remus, Cain killed his brother Abel and was then banished to the land of Nod (“wandering”) and built the first city Enoch, which in Mesopotamia was Eridu. Later Kassite myth said that the first priest of Eridu, Adapa, was taken up to heaven where he met Dumuzi and Gizzida (“Good Tree,” Dumuzi’s double from the city of Lagash) playing St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, after which Adapa, on the advice of the wise God Enki playing the role of the snake in the Garden of Eden, denied the sky god Anu’s offer of the bread and water of eternal life, mirroring the Biblical interpretation of the Fall of Man and the story of the Biblical Enoch being taken up into heaven.

The second Sumerian capital city to take hold in ancient Sumer was Bad-Tibira (“The Fortress of Metal Smiths”), a natural identification for Tubal-Cain (“Bringer of Metal Smithery”), and the third king to rule the city was none other than Dumuzi the Shepherd. Another Dumuzi, called “the Fisherman,” ruled Uruk right before the famous king Gilgamesh. Since this Dumuzi captured the king to a rival dynasty in Kish that Gilgamesh was also in conflict with, it may be reasonable to link this Dumuzi with the tragic figure of Enkidu, who in Sumerian myth is blindly sent to the underworld by Gilgamesh only to be trapped there for not heeding Gilgamesh’s warnings. The Epic of Gilgamesh later absolves Gilgamesh of any guilt by placing the blame on Ishtar, just as Inanna is said to have been regretfully responsible for Dumuzi’s death in other versions of the Dumuzi myth. In yet another version, Dumuzi’s sister, Geshtinanna takes vengence on the storm goddess who killed Dumuzi, just as Ba’al Hadad’s sister/lover Anat takes revenge on the underworld god Mot for slaying her brother in a later Canaanite myth. In the Coptic Gospel of Judas, Egyptian Gnostics also rewrote the Passion story so that Judas betrayal of Jesus was a necessary part of some deeper cosmic mystery.

At the heart of this world myth lies the complimentary forces of good and evil, king and slave, and sacrifice and betrayal. The Persian historian and mythologist Mehrdad Bahar argued that the figure of the Haji Firuz is derived from ceremonies and legends connected to the Epic of Prince Siavash, which in turn derive from the ancient myths of Dumuzi, with the blackened face of the Hajji Firuz reaching back into the ancient symbolism of the vegetation god returning from the world of the dead, while his red clothing symbolized Siavash’s blood and the return of the sacrificed deity. His joviality, as with the Biblical Jubal, is the jubilation of Spring’s rebirth. The mothers of Baldr and Achilles, “the woman clothed in sun” in Revelation, and the Athena-like goddess of wisdom spoken of in the Toledot Yeshu all represent the same overarching theme of a protective mother or sister goddess watching over her Savior son/lover, who always dies tragically but is then reborn, whether it be Dumuzi, Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Dionysus, Baldr, or Jesus.

One thing I noticed about Hitchens that has completely confounded the Left is his so-called “conversion” from Liberal to Neo-Con, exemplified by his “betrayal” of Sidney Blumenthal to get at Clinton during his impeachment, and his support for the Iraq War.

Certainly it can be proved that, disregarding these two controversies, just about every position Hitchens has taken, including his approval of Sweden, can be placed on the Left side of the political axis. I think the problem with this is that almost everyone gets caught up in the Liberal vs. Neo-Con fight, it’s easy to forget that he was never very interested in the predominate cable news battles and typically limited himself to matters of foreign affairs. When the domestic agenda is one’s primary focus, it’s much easier to defend Clinton as a means of stopping a Republican takeover of politics.

I think it’s pretty easy to figure out the reason for his focus on world affairs: he was neither a Liberal nor a Neo-Con but rather never stopped being a Trotskyist. While Liberals and Neo-Cons both saw in Iraq a rematch of the same generational conflicts brought on by the Vietnam War, Hitchens’ belief that the North Vietnamese were not our enemy caused him to completely dismiss the parallels, so that he continued pushing for charges to be brought up against Henry Kissinger even as he made friends with certain Bushites like Paul Wolfowitz who many Liberals would rather have seen arrested. His single contribution to the state of the economic crisis was an article named “The Revenge of Karl Marx.”

Although his book, “No One Left to Lie To” managed to convince me that Clinton was in fact a mass-murdering rapist, his arguments in “A Long Short War,” based on the assumption that the Iraq War is a continuation of the Gulf War (which he ironically opposed at first), appeared to me to be sourced in the revolutionary desire for instant change over the more progressive strategy of gradual improvements (typified by the failed attempts to force regime change through sanctions). This belief was confirmed by a recent article of his called “In Defense of Endless War.”

As Glenn Greenwald snarkily put it: “Chris Hitchens last week: Endless War is good… Now: when’s Obama going to get our enemy Pakistan?”

I often wonder why no one ever asked him, “Exactly how many people would have to die for you to admit that the war was a mistake?” I think the answer to this is that he was less interested in the end-results of the Iraq War, which even many heard-headed Republicans have started to realize is indefensible in terms of lives and money lost, and instead saw it more along the lines of the “Big Picture” that the Saddam regime had to be removed — no matter the cost — as part of the world-wide ongoing transition from tyranny to freedom. He gave a similar answer that Lenin’s Communist Revolution, which killed millions, was necessary. Whereas Liberal Progressives are so-named because of their idealization of slow, non-violent change being the hallmark of civilized politics, Hitchens was closer in embracing the founding figure of the Democratic Party in saying that “Rather than [the French Revolution] should have failed, I would have seen half the Earth destroyed!” Having written a book on Jefferson and used Jefferson’s war on the Barbary Pirates as a precedent for the War on Terrorism, I would not be surprised if he held similar beliefs about the Iraq War. Another example would be the American Civil War that Karl Marx supported, which slaughtered more human beings than it freed from the bonds of slavery, but is nevertheless assumed to an entirely necessary step in the evolution of human freedom.

This belief that the ends justifies the means, working under the assumption these battles against tyranny are absolutely essential for the greater war against World Totalitarianism, is what I think drove his support for the War on Terror. Whereas Neo-Cons attempted to use America’s ignorance of history to argue that Saddam needed to be taken out due to the millions of Iranians and Kurds he slaughtered while forgetting to mention that the U.S. was supporting him at the time, Hitchens went the other direction to say that our prior support of Saddam made us all the more responsible for the fate of that country. For him, it was never about the danger Saddam posed to us but the danger his regime posed to the surrounding states of the future. Of course, the problem with this is assuming winning the battle justifies the losses and that winning the war justifies the battles, when it seems more likely that violence just begets more violence until the country simply erupts into chaos and everyone loses.

Although I think he has made some very compelling cases against the Pope that others may find extreme, his anti-theism has often been placed in the context of this same war against Totalitarianism: that the belief in God can be compared to a “celestial North Korea,” as he very often put it. But that comparison has never had any more force with me than Richard Dawkins’ pathetic simile for God being as realistic as a flying spaghetti monster. Working under the Freudian assumption that one’s parents often provide a massive subconscious influence, I can’t help but think that the suicide pact Hitchens’ mother made with a priest played a large part in his “anti-theism,” which if one parses the words, can be interpreted as an intellectual redefintion of hating God.

I could be wrong. Like most Liberals, I assumed that Bush’s desire to invade Iraq could be at least partially traced back to the belief that Saddam had tried to have his father assassinated, but began to have my doubts that Bush was emotionally involved in wanting Saddam dead when I heard that he had decided to sleep through the dictator’s hanging.

But for me, the thing that I will always remember Christopher Hitchens the most for is when he got into a street brawl with Syrian neo-Nazis after going up to a sign with a “cylone” swastika on it and scribbling, “No, no, Fuck the SSNP.” As Hitchens said, “My attitude to posters with swastikas on them, has always been the same. They should be ripped down.” Not many people can truly claim to have been in a fist fight with fascists. After his ass kicked and barely escaping with his life, his friend Michael Totten told him, “The SSNP is the last party you want to mess with in Lebanon. I’m sorry I didn’t warn you properly. This is partly my fault.” While I think most people would be berating themselves for their own stupidity, Hitchens’ reply best sums up his own combination of principle and ballsiness:

“I appreciate that. But I would have done it anyway. One must take a stand. One simply must.”

David Frum on Hitchens’ Death

Eric Alterman on Hitchens

Peter Hitchens on his Brother’s Death

Preview of Christopher Hitchens’ Last Interview (Part 2)

Final Memoir, “Mortality,” to Be Published in January

“Being a writer is what I am, rather than what I do.” -Christopher Hitchens

One of the writers of the Family Guy told of the abuse he and other protestors took from the LAPD:

It was horrible to watch, and apparently designed to terrorize the rest of us. At least I was sufficiently terrorized. I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.

My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and palm.

NewScientist reports that an analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy. There is continuing evidence that economic inequality harms socieites. Both sides are taking in major donations from Wall Street, and Politifact points out that “a large majority” of candidates with the most money wins and the U.S. is the 6th most unequal country on the planet.

Yet support for redistribution has actually plummeted during the recession. Scientific American attributes this to a fundamental psychological loathing for being near or in last place, called “last place aversion,” a fear that can lead people near the bottom of the income distribution to oppose redistribution because it might cause those they identify as being lower than them to catch up or even pass them. Naomi Klein attributed it to the “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. I think there is something to that in Irving Kristol’s suggestion that Neo-Cons force Democrats to “tidy up” after them. The Republicans destroy the deficit with tax cuts and destroy the economy with deregulation then they get to sit back and alter between screaming at Obama to fix the economy and fix the deficit just as Bill Wilson was masturbating to the thought of forcing Obama to choose between paying social security or the armed forces. All the while Fox News-addled baby boomers start looking in desperation to terminate all the government departments that neither Perry nor the Republican base know enough to list on one hand to save money since “we’re broke.” Even Reuters is getting in on the act of blaming Occupy Wall Street on George Soros.

The economy and the deficit spending has done a lot better since Obama took over. Ezra Klein points out that a lot of the deficit comes from assumptions that we won’t let tax cuts expire. Paul Krugman plots out how nonresidential investment is a pure demand story.

Stock trader Alessio Rastani told how stock traders were looking forward to the possibility of a second big recession: “For most traders, it’s not about – we don’t really care that much how they’re going to fix the economy, how they’re going to fix the whole situation,” he said. “Our job is to make money from it.” And even when the inflation and long-term interest rates that people like Alan Greenspan predict don’t show up, they lament that, “This is regrettable, because it is fostering a sense of complacency that can have dire consequences.”

David Frum wrote a really interesting article about how the unbelievably horrible roster of Republicans is based on future shock:

This year we had a GOP figure candidate rise to the top of some polls by claiming that Obama was born in Kenya. He was replaced briefly by someone who has accused the President of trying to set up mandatory, Communist-style re-education camps for youth. She’s been replaced by a guy who calls Social Security a giant fraud.

Something has changed. Facts are elitist. Credibility is evolving into a liability and crazy has become a tactic.

…

Maybe we are in the process of redefining sanity. We have an abundance of reliable information to help us separate what is from what isn’t. But we are also being overwhelmed by shiny distractions. And it’s not just our omnipresent entertainment that is weakening our hold on what’s real. This wealth of accurate information is available inside an atmosphere in which reality is becoming perilously complex. Even the most common tools and devices that are woven into the fabric of our daily lives are now wonders beyond simple credibility.

With all the attacks on Republicans lately, some people have wondered why Frum still calls himself one. He gives a list of reasons, none of which are very compelling.

Paul Krugman suggests the reason Cain “is not an accident” is because you have to either be totally cynical or totally clueless to meet the basic G.O.P. requirements for running for president. Mitt Romney is a total cynic but a bad actor, so it becomes a perpertual runoff between him and those who are clueless enough to actually believe the stupid shit they’re saying.

A relative of mine recently sent me an article written about Jim Rogers, an American investor who shills for the free market theory of the Austrian School of economics. It read:

>President Barack Obama has tried to spend the economy back into recovery, which never helps, Rogers told Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview.

Oh yeah, NewsMax. The leader in Obama birth certificate conspiracy news.

>”We cannot quadruple our debt every four or five years. We cannot print staggering amounts of money every four or five years. So there’s going to come time when we’ve shot all of our bullets, and it’s going to be a big mess.”

Obama has not quadripled the debt. Reagan tripled the debt then Bush tripled it again. Why is it Republicans are allowed to overspend on tax cuts when there’s no reason to believe super-rich corporations need extra money to invest, but Democrats aren’t allowed to spend money on people who need it when the economy is depressed?

>Japan refused to let troubled financial institutions go under in the early 1990s and as a result, spent two decades mired in sluggish recovery.

Their Lost Decade comes from policies that were too-little-too-late, not from spending too much. When our stimulus came around, Krugman argued it was too little. The response was we can always get another stimulus if we need it, but Krugman responded that no, if the stimulus didn’t completely recover the economy, then that would be used as proof that the stimulus failed. Sure enough, that’s what happened. The bipartisan fact-checker Politifact has shown that the stimulus did work for the money that was put into it. The non-partisan CBO also says we need to spend more money. The economic basis goes back to Keynes, who correctly predicted that if the Germans were forced into austerity for reparations by France during the Depression that it would open their politics up to radicalism. Keynes was also right that by spending tons of money on WW2, it stimulated the economy enough to get us out of the Depression.

>Scandinavia took the opposite approach when it ran into an economic downturn and today is healthy, Rogers points out.

You know an argument is full of crap when they tell you to look to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are models of right-wing economics!!! Scandanavia is one of the few places on the planet that doesn’t have a huge gap between the rich and the poor because of their extremely high tax rates. So yeah, they didn’t need to pay for a stimulus because 1) they did the right thing from the beginning and 2) the safety net was already there!!! I’ve supported Sweden’s bailout model since I first heard about it 3 years ago. The important thing to know is they didn’t let the banks get away with it. The government took over the banks and they took their pound of flesh from the stockholders. The banks actually had to write down their losses and issue warrants to the government. The people pushing this “no-stimulus” stuff like Newsmax are the same ones who say the banks were forced to lend money to minorities when the fact is they were really trying to hide how much of these loans went to minorities from the government.

>On top of hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus measures the administration has rolled out, the Federal Reserve has pumped $2.3 trillion into the economy via quantitative easing, which are asset purchase from banks that critics describe as printed money with little backing that in the end threatens to push up inflation rates.

I agree that we shouldn’t use QE. It does expand the economy, but it also increases the wealth gap, which has been a major part of the problem since 1978. The problem isn’t that banks don’t have money to loan, it’s that they see no way to profit since they are the only ones who have any money now.

Media Matters also has a short story about Larry Summers. He once brought up a story about talking to a girl who was protesting the World Bank’s annual meeting, saying : “And so I asked the girl: ‘What is this new system that you want? Tell me about it!’ And the girl had nothing. Nothing! She had no fucking clue what this magical new system was supposed to be. No one is saying that there aren’t problems with the world economy the way it is today. But these kids out there — they don’t know what they want!”

Zack Exley, a political and technology consultant, the Chief Community Officer at the Wikimedia and Co-Founder of the progressive New Organizing Institute, replied: “Mr. Secretary. You’ve got 50 economics PhDs in this room who pretty much run the world economy. And you’re asking that girl for a better system? Aren’t the solutions your job? You admit billions are living in hell, but it’s up to that girl to fix it?”

Jon Stewart did a great piece on how the pilgrims were better informed about the pagan history behind Christmas than Fox News anchors.

But let me end on Joe Arpaio, the self-proclaimed “toughest Sheriff in America”, who in the past made headlines for his hard-line stance toward immigration. He’s recently admitted that his office’s botched investigations of over 400 sex-crimes cases. One might think that it came from spending too much time helping Steven Seagal kill a puppy and hundreds of roosters by driving a tank into a home for…. what was it again? Oh yeah: animal cruelty.

That’s the actual headline:

Actor Steven Seagal Sued for Driving Tank into Arizona Home, Killing Puppy

The story reads:

Seagal told a local radio station that animal cruelty was one of his pet peeves, and since the bust was an animal cruelty bust – which apparently requires the use of several armored cars, a tank, and dozens of sheriff’s deputies in full riot gear – Seagal decided to go along for the ride…and kill hundreds of roosters and a puppy in the process.

Seagal is being sued for $100,000 by the illegal immigrants. Merry Christmas, everyone.

“These days, you constantly see articles that make it seem as if there was a great debate in the 1930s between Keynes and Hayek, and that this debate has continued through the generations. As Warsh says, nothing like this happened. Hayek essentially made a fool of himself early in the Great Depression, and his ideas vanished from the professional discussion.

So why is his name invoked so much now? Because The Road to Serfdom struck a political chord with the American right, which adopted Hayek as a sort of mascot — and retroactively inflated his role as an economic thinker. Warsh is even crueler about this than I would have been; he compares Hayek (or rather the “Hayek” invented by his admirers) to Rosie Ruiz, who claimed to have won the marathon, but actually took the subway to the finish line.” -Paul Krugman

Milton Friedman would probably be a better choice for the right-wing equivalent of Keynes, but he more-or-less added on to Keynes rather than completely opposed him (“In one sense, we are all Keynesians now; in another, nobody is any longer a Keynesian”). But now that the far right is embracing economic policies that are over 40 years old, they have to go further back and find someone who completely opposed him.

Glenn Beck interviews Jesus

I noticed that there a few of these Xtranormal critter videos attacking global warming science:

So I made a parody of them:

America’s New Presidential Hopeful: Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, New(t) Gingrich!

“[Dodd-Frank] establishes a mandatory 20 percent down payment to buy a house. So at a time when housing prices have dropped worse than the Great Depression, we’re now going to have a law that guarantees there’s no housing market for a generation?” –Newt Gingrich

“It’s totally incorrect to say that Dodd-Frank came up with the 20 percent down payment standard. It just could not be further from the truth. So whoever says that is just misinformed.” –Ken Harney, a real estate columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group.

“By June 22, Gingrich himself had backed off, acknowledging that the 20 percent rule was just a proposal. And even the proposed rule would not make a large down payment mandatory.” –Politifact.com

“Community banks are 12 percent of the banks right now and 40 percent of the loans to small business. And they are being destroyed by Dodd-Frank.”

“Gingrich said that community banks “are being destroyed by Dodd-Frank.” But as a whole they are healthier than a year ago. No doubt the improvement in the economy has helped, but community banks also have benefited from a reduction in fees paid to the FDIC as a result of Dodd-Frank. From the point of view of community banks, Dodd-Frank is imperfect and still unfolding. But it has exempted community banks from many new regulations.” –Politifact.com

“But let’s be clear who put the fix in: the fix was put in by the federal government. And if you want to put people in jail, I will second what Michelle said: let’s look at Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and let’s look at the politicians who profited from the environment and the politicians who put this country in trouble.” –Newt Gingrich

“Frank noted that he and Dodd, now retired and running the Motion Picture Association of America, were members of the minority party during that time. Gingrich was speaker from 1995 to 1999.” –U.S.A. Today

“Newt Gingrich made between $1.6 million and $1.8 million in consulting fees from two contracts with mortgage company Freddie Mac, according to two people familiar with the arrangement….. Gingrich said during the CNBC debate that he advised the troubled firm as a “historian.”…. Former Freddie Mac officials familiar with his work in 2006 say Gingrich was asked to build bridges to Capitol Hill Republicans and develop an argument on behalf of the company’s public-private structure that would resonate with conservatives seeking to dismantle it.” –Bloomberg News

“He’s not a historian. Hire Sean Wilentz, hire Gordon Wood if you want a historian.” -George Will

“In terms of the actual corruption stuff, no, it’s not better it all. … They rearrange the chairs on the deck but the ship doesn’t change course.” –Jack “Abramoff scandal” Abramoff on Newt Gingrich

“The Congressional Budget Office is a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated.” -Newt Gingrich to CNN Money.

“And what if the traditionalist-conservatives are right and a . . . tax cut, without corresponding cuts in expenditures, also leaves us with a fiscal problem? The neo-conservative is willing to leave those problems to be coped with by liberal interregnums. He wants to shape the future, and will leave it up to his opponents to tidy up afterwards. ” –Irving Kristol, the “Father of Neo-Conservatism,” as well as the father of chief Bush cheerleader Bill Kristol, Wall Street Journal, 1980 (right before the Reagan Administration)

“You [Dick Cheney] were famously quoted in the early part of the Bush administration as saying that deficits don’t matter. That’s when debt as a share of GDP was about 40% or so, and deficits were about 4% of GDP. Now it’s 9% of GDP as a deficit and closer to 70% of debt as a share of GDP. Do deficits matter more now?” –Paul Gigot, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 2011

“I think it’s important to put that comment in context. I had, during my 10 years in the House, one of the most conservative voting records. I think my conservative credentials are well-established, in terms of fiscal policy. But this was in the early days of the administration. I was referring to the beginning of the Reagan administration, when he simultaneously cut taxes, reduced revenue and increased defense spending. He didn’t pay a political price for the deficit that resulted. It turned out to be sound policy, both in terms of the military buildup, as well as the change in tax policy and the reduction in rates and so forth. And there are circumstances under which just the deficit per se doesn’t have the kind of political consequences that we’re faced with now, obviously.” –Dick Cheney

“You mean to tell me that the success of the economic program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” –Bill Clinton during his presidency

“We will make it so that a Democrat cannot govern as a Democrat.” –Grover Norquist, 2003

“A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters’ confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that “they are all crooks,” and that “government is no good,” further leading them to think, “a plague on both your houses” and “the parties are like two kids in a school yard.” This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s – a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn (“Government is the problem,” declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable “hard news” segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the “respectable” media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the “centrist cop-out.” “I joked long ago,” he says, “that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read ‘Views Differ on Shape of Planet.’”" –Mike Lofgren, recently retired Republican staff member on Capitol Hill

“In 2003, when France opposed going to war in Iraq, the U.S. took the next logical step: its House of Representatives’ cafeterias stopped serving French fries. They served “freedom fries” instead. Naturally, “French toast” became “freedom toast” as well. Republican Representatives Walter Jones and Bob Ney, who was the chairman of the House Administration Committee at the time and angered at “our so-called ally, France,” made it happen. The change didn’t have unanimous support. “Making Congress look even sillier than it sometimes looks would not be high on my priority list,” said Democratic Representative Barney Frank, clearly lacking in both patriotism and knowledge of France’s historic disdain for liberty. Well, the House fries ditched “freedom” in 2006 … around the same time Ney, who pleaded guilty to corruption charges, lost his.” –Time Magazine, Top 10 Dubious Name Changes

“When Joe Wilson spoke about the former administration, he was a bit more forthcoming. He pulled no punches in describing Cheney as the force behind the whole thing. Former Congressman Ney said basically the same thing, that Cheney was the “instigator” and the he “pushed for it,” but then he said: “Bush night have done it, but Cheney was surely there being the cheerleader.” –Daily Kos

“It was not so long ago that Texas governor Bush denounced attempts to cut the earned-income tax credit as “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.” By 2011, Republican commentators were noisily complaining that the poorer half of society are “lucky duckies” because the EITC offsets their federal tax obligations—or because the recession had left them with such meager incomes that they had no tax to pay in the first place. In 2000, candidate Bush routinely invoked “churches, synagogues, and mosques.” By 2010, prominent Republicans were denouncing the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan as an outrageous insult. In 2003, President Bush and a Republican majority in Congress enacted a new ­prescription-drug program in Medicare. By 2011, all but four Republicans in the House and five in the Senate were voting to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from everybody under age 55. Today, the Fed’s pushing down interest rates in hopes of igniting economic growth is close to treason, according to Governor Rick Perry, coyly seconded by The Wall Street Journal. In 2000, the same policy qualified Alan Greenspan as the “greatest central banker in the history of the world,” according to Perry’s mentor, Senator Phil Gramm. Today, health reform that combines regulation of private insurance, individual mandates, and subsidies for those who need them is considered unconstitutional and an open invitation to “death panels.” A dozen years ago, a very similar reform was the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare. Today, stimulative fiscal policy that includes tax cuts for almost every American is “socialism.” In 2001, stimulative fiscal policy that included tax cuts for rather fewer Americans was an economic­-recovery program.

I can’t shrug off this flight from reality and responsibility as somebody else’s problem. I belonged to this movement; I helped to make the mess. People may very well say: Hey, wait a minute, didn’t you work in the George W. Bush administration that disappointed so many people in so many ways? What qualifies you to dispense advice to anybody else?

Fair question. I am haunted by the Bush experience, although it seems almost presumptuous for someone who played such a minor role to feel so much unease. The people who made the big decisions certainly seem to sleep well enough. Yet there is also the chance for something positive to come out of it all. True, some of my colleagues emerged from those years eager to revenge themselves and escalate political conflict: “They send one of ours to the hospital, we send two of theirs to the morgue.” I came out thinking, I want no more part of this cycle of revenge. ” –David Frum, “Axis of Evil” speechwriter for Bush

“The average annual cost to businesses under Obama is higher than under his predecessors, the Bloomberg review shows. The increase is estimated to total as little as $100 million or as much as $4.1 billion, or at most three one-hundredths of a percent of the total economy.” -Bloomberg News, “Obama Wrote 5% Fewer Rules Than Bush While Costing Business”

“[The European Central Bank video game will] grade you on the basis of a pure inflation targeting regime asymmetrically centered at 2 percent. I played a round in which inflation averaged -0.25% and we had a continent-wide depression in which output fell for twelve straight quarters. They gave me 2 stars out of four. I also ran a game in which inflation average 4.16% and we had zero quarters of recession. They gave me zero stars even though in the higher inflation scenario I was closer to the 2% target!” –Robert Yglesias

“There are many Republican misunderstandings about monetary policy, so it can be hard to know where to start.

-For a while, conservatives thought that just because the monetary base had expanded that inflation was inevitable, ignoring the point that simply having a large money base means nothing for inflation if money is not actually being exchanged in transactions.

-Conservatives also had a habit of interpreting high commodity prices during the summer as a sign of oncoming inflation. They haven’t updated their view to account for the current fall in commodity prices.

-In fact, America might benefit from a short period of inflation to make it easier for debts to be repaid, yet the thrust of the recent GOP attacks on the Federal Reserve is that inflation cannot be allowed to rise at all.

There are numerous conservative ways to support an expansionary monetary policy, currently the most fashionable one is to call for a Nominal GDP target. It is likely that any policy would likely be better than current conservative calls for higher interest rates or even in some cases, a gold standard.

Perhaps the most important reason conservative should support monetary expansion is that it can offset the contractionary effects of fiscal austerity. Yet this benefit gets ignored by many Republicans because…

Republicans have reversed past convictions and now claim fiscal austerity always works.” –David Frum

“We’ve been told again and again that the real motivation of the Tea Party is a multi-partisan movement to bring the debt and government under control. I’ve never believed this, partly because these people were never to be found under Bush. It was primarily a laundering device to disappear the Bush years, re-brand the GOP as a wholly different entity and thereby avoid the long wilderness that the catastrophes of the first decade of this century might have led them
into. Now we have some large data sets to review the reality. And the reality is that the Tea Party is the Christianist right-wing of the GOP.” –Andrew Sullivan

“Okay, Libya…. [glancing up....] President Obama supported the uprising, correct? President Obama called for the removal of Gaddafi. Just wanted to make sure we’re talking about the same thing before I say, ‘Yes, I agreed. No, I didn’t agree,’ I do not agree with the way he handled it for the following reason– Nope, that’s a different one…. [looking up again....] I would have assessed the opposition differently…. It’s not a clear yes-no answer, because all of those things I think should have been assessed, that’s what I’m saying…. I got all this stuff twirling around in my head… I would have done a better job of determining who the opposition is. And I’m sure that our intelligence people had some of that information. Based upon who made up that opposition… might have caused me to make some different decisions about how we participated. Secondly, no I did not agree with Gadhafi killing his citizens. Absolutely not…. I would have supported many of the things that they did to help stop that… I would have gone about assessing the situation differently. It might have caused us to end up in the same place.” –Herman Cain, as confused and alienated to questions he should have seen coming as the Penn State coach.

“The liberal court found [Jesus] guilty of false offences and sentenced Him to death, all because He changed the hearts and minds of men with an army of 12. His death reset the clock of time. Never before and not since has there ever been such a perfect conservative.” –Herman Cain

“Lesson 1: The danger of closed information systems. Well before the crash of 2008, the U.S. economy was sending ominous warning signals. Median incomes were stagnating. Home prices rose beyond their rental values. Consumer indebtedness was soaring. Instead, conservatives preferred to focus on positive signals — job numbers, for example — to describe the Bush economy as “the greatest story never told.”

Too often, conservatives dupe themselves. They wrap themselves in closed information systems based upon pretend information. In this closed information system, banks can collapse without injuring the rest of the economy, tax cuts always pay for themselves and Congressional earmarks cause the federal budget deficit. Even the market collapse has not shaken some conservatives out of their closed information system. It enfolded them more closely within it. This is how to understand the Glenn Beck phenomenon. Every day, Beck offers alternative knowledge — an alternative history of the United States and the world, an alternative system of economics, an alternative reality. As corporate profits soar, the closed information system insists that the free-enterprise system is under assault. As prices slump, we are warned of imminent hyperinflation. As black Americans are crushed under Depression-level unemployment, the administration’s policies are condemned by some conservatives as an outburst of Kenyan racial revenge against the white overlord.

Meanwhile, Republican officeholders who want to explain why they acted to prevent the collapse of the U.S. banking system can get no hearing from voters seized with certainty that a bank collapse would have done no harm to ordinary people. Support for TARP has become a career-ender for Republican incumbents, and we shall see what it does to Mitt Romney, the one national Republican figure who still defends TARP.

The same vulnerability to closed information systems exists on the liberal side of U.S. politics as well, of course. But the fact that my neighbor is blind in one eye is no excuse for blinding myself in both.”

Lesson 2: “The market” (the whole free-market system) must be
distinguished from “the markets” (the trading markets for financial assets). Perhaps it’s because the most influential conservative voice on economic affairs is The Wall Street Journal. Perhaps it’s because conservatism disproportionately draws support from retirees who store their savings in traded financial assets. Perhaps it’s because a booming financial sector is uniquely generous with its campaign
contributions. Whatever the reason, the intellectual right accords a deference to the wants and wishes of the financial industry that is seldom accorded to agriculture, manufacturing, transport or retailing.

But it’s not always true that what’s good for Goldman Sachs is good for the economy, or vice versa. Nor is what “the markets” want the same as what free-market economics require. Finance plays with other people’s money: financial disasters damage people and businesses who never participated in the fatal transaction. For that reason, financial firms are justly regulated in ways that other firms are not.
And yet nearly 80 years after the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, influential conservatives — including The Wall Street Journal editorial board — argued that trillions of dollars of derivatives trading should be exempt from regulation.

Lesson 3: The economy is more important than the budget. During the recession of 1981-82, Democratic politicians demanded that a Republican president set a balanced budget as his top priority. Ronald Reagan disregarded this advice. He held firm to his tax cuts: once the economy returned to prosperity, there would be time then to deal with
the deficit.

Today, the positions are reversed. The big Republican idea of 2010 was Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget road map, which offered a serious plan to address Social Security and Medicare shortfalls. But what’s the most striking fact about Ryan’s budget plan is precisely that it is a budget plan — it’s a document concerned with government finance, not
the crisis in the economy. How will balancing the budget in the 2020s and 2030s, which is when the plan has most of its impact, create jobs and save homes in the here and now? This was the kind of problem that preoccupied the supply-siders of the 1980s and should again preoccupy Republicans today.

If Republicans reject Obama-style fiscal stimulus, what do they advocate instead? A monetarist might recommend more money creation, even at the risk of inflation: “quantitative easing,” as it’s called.

Yet leading voices in the Republican Party have convinced themselves that the country is on the verge of hyperinflation — a Weimar moment, says Glenn Beck. But if fiscal stimulus leads to socialism, and quantitative easing leads to Nazism, what on earth are we supposed to do? Cut the budget? But we won’t do that either! On Sean Hannity’s radio show, the Republican House leader John Boehner announced just
before the election that one of his first priorities would be the repeal of the Obama Medicare cuts.

Lesson 4: Even from a conservative point of view, the welfare state is not all bad. G. K. Chesterton observed that you should never take a fence down until you understand why it had been put up. We should remember why the immediate post-Depression generations created so many social-welfare programs. They were not motivated only — or even
primarily — by “compassion.” They were motivated as well by the desire for stability.

Social Security, unemployment insurance and other benefits were designed as anti-Depression defenses, “automatic stabilizers” as economists called them. When people lost their jobs, their incomes did not drop by 100 percent, but by 30 percent or 40 percent: they could continue to pay rent, buy food and sustain society’s overall level of
demand for goods and services. State pensions created a segment of society whose primary incomes remained stable regardless of economic conditions. The growth of the higher-education sector and of health care had a similar effect.

This shift to a more welfare-oriented economy helps explain why business cycles in the second half of the 20th century were so much less volatile than they were in the 19th century. And fortunately enough, this shift put a floor under the economic collapse of 2008-09. Retirees who lost their savings had to cut back painfully. But at
least their Social Security checks continued to arrive. People who lost their jobs might lose their homes. But they continued to buy food and clothing. And the industries that sold those basic necessities continued to function — unlike in 1929-33, when the whole economy collapsed upon itself.

Those who denounce unemployment insurance as an invitation to idleness in an economy where there are at least five job seekers for every available job are not just hardening their hearts against distress. They are rejecting the teachings of Milton Friedman, who emphasized the value of automatic stabilizers fully as much as John Maynard Keynes ever did. Conservatives should want a smaller welfare state
than liberals in order to uphold maximum feasible individual liberty and responsibility. But the conservative ideal is not the abolition of the modern welfare state, and we should be careful of speaking in ways that communicate a more radical social ideal than that which we actually uphold and intend.” –David Frum

“Direna had a camera in her hand and I had a microphone, and we were being hit. When I fell to the ground I said at one point, ‘I’m just covering this! I’m covering this!’ And the officer just said, ‘Come on, get up, get up,’ before pulling me up by my jacket.’…. The protesters came up to me right away and asked if I needed any medical assistance. They were actually very kind and helpful. It was the police officers who were very aggressive,” –Michelle Fields, reporter for Conservative website, Daily Caller, “Daily Caller reporter, videographer assaulted by NYPD during ‘Occupy’ protests”

“The rich alone use imported articles, and on these alone the whole taxes of the General Government are levied. … Our revenues liberated by the discharge of the public debt, and its surplus applied to canals, roads, schools, etc., the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings.

The great mass of the articles on which impost is paid is foreign luxuries, purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford themselves the use of them. Their patriotism would certainly prefer its continuance and application to the great purposes of the public education, roads, rivers, canals, and such other objects of public improvement as it may be thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of federal powers.

We are all the more reconciled to the tax on importations, because it falls exclusively on the rich, and with the equal partition of intestate’s estates, constitutes the best agrarian law. In fact, the poor man in this country who uses nothing but what is made within his own farm or family, or within the United States, pays not a farthing of tax to the General Government, but on his salt; and should we go into that manufacture as we ought to do, he will pay not one cent.” –Thomas Jefferson

I confessed to a friend that when I first heard about the drought that is killing tens of thousands in Africa, I felt pretty depressed. His response was shock. He said that he figured it was all “mental rhetoric,” and that it wasn’t like I actually cared about any of it really.

Shock over someone feeling bad over so large a tragedy to me seemed rather absurd. But I backtracked a little nevertheless, replying that “a little down” would have been a better description than depressed and when I reflected on it, a lot of my emotional attachment was really based on being tired and irritated from long work hours and distant commutes. Getting home late on Tuesdays for the first time since Monday morning, I was usually irritable. If I hadn’t been down about that, I probably would have been down about something else.

At the same time it felt to me that this crisis was something that, more than anything, deserved people getting depressed over. Climate change is one of the most significant dangers to humankind, so as someone who is interested in the history of man, one would expect to take what is almost certainly the forerunner to what is mankind’s greatest backstep to be at least as emotionally debilitating as one might take their football team losing. Although my friend admitted that he sometimes felt bad after his favorite team lost, he nevertheless seemed sure that my interest in distant matters like that was affecting my happiness more than it was worth.

But what is really depressing is that the media isn’t covering it at all. There’s 11 million people who are in dire need of food and water. An estimated 29,000 children starved to death in Somalia in 90 days. Some 2 million children are malnourished, and another 500,000 children may starve while an estimated 12 million people in the region need emergency assistance. The massive donations to relief efforts because of the 2004 tsunami were helped by huge media interest, but with all the economic problems hitting the U.S. and Europe, the mass deaths in Africa are largely overlooked, meaning less in donations.

Africa has always been known to be the most vulnerable to climate change. A report by the international humanitarian organization DARA estimated that climate change would kill up to 5 million children, most of them under five years old, in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa over the next decade. But even though the IPCC had cited a non-peer reviewed study saying that Africa’s crop yield would be cut in half by 2020, other work cited by the IPCC actually predicted that climate change would weaken the Walker Effect, ultimately causing more rainfall in East Africa. Models done by Climate Dynamics and Climate Hazard Group model how climate change has instead weakened the Walker Effect attempt. If nothing else, it’s certainly a grim foretaste of the future.

Aside from that, the fact that the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment report won’t even be released until 2014 has made Joe Romm question whether the entire panel has rendered itself useless.

A study done by the University of Pittsburgh on the 2,300 year climate record recovered from an Andes Mountains lake reveals massive water shortages will also hit the densely populated tropical regions as temperatures rise due to drier monsoons. The team found that equatorial regions of South America were already are receiving less rainfall than at any point in the past 1000 years.

Following the Russian president’s humiliating about-face on climate following 15,000 people dying from his country being roasted, several other states and countries have spontaneously combusted in the past year: Australia, Brazil, Texas, and Arizona. Russia’s ban on grain exports, which caused a spike in food prices, may have ultimately brought about the Arab Spring. In Australia, climate scientists are having to deal with multiple death threats. The drought in Texas only got worse after Rick Perry called for Texans to pray for rain. And McCain, who promised to put a investment into nuclear on the campaign trail in 2008, blamed the fires in his home state on…. immigrants.

The Bonn Climate Talks last June ended with no agreement in sight about the future of the Kyoto Protocol, how to operationalize the agreements reached in Cancun, and international climate finance.

And last summer a huge ice island the size of London broke off from Greenland’s glacier.

In other bad news, emails now show that the Obama White House tried to rush federal reviewers to push through a $500 million loan to the solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra so that Biden could gloat about it at a looming press event at the company’s factory in 2009. Despite the fact Solyndra was pushing congress for more subsidies, the company didn’t act like it was short on money when it spent $1.3 million lobbying mostly Democrats, but also a few Republicans. House Democrats even resisted Republicans investigating Solyndra “in part because of the rosy picture presented by company officials who did a summertime lobbying swing through Washington.”

Ezra Klein points out that Solyndra’s loan, the only one that went belly-up, represents just 1.3% of $38 billion in loans for 40 projects and that the private market is drastically under-investing in new energy technology, with the utility sector spending just 0.1% to 0.3% of its revenues on R&D when the national average is 3.5%. Only $3 billion was invested in energy R&D in 2009 compared to $36.5 billion going to the National Institutes of Health and $77 billion going to defense research. While Republicans look at Solar as a doomed enterprise, the reason Solyndra collapsed is because the company had invented a non-silicon solar panel right before silicon prices plummeted, meaning competitors like the ones massively subsidized ones in China are expected to be competetive with dirty energy within 10 years. Scientific American sees the price drop as being equivalent to Moore’s Law. Politifact cites a 2008 Energy Department report saying it would be possible for wind energy to provide 20% of the nation’s electricity supply by 2030, but unless policies change, wind and solar combined will only account for 4% of U.S. consumption by 2035.

And despite the fact Louisiana Senator David Vitter wrote the Energy Department 7 times since 2009 seeking money for projects that would benefit his home state and signed a Republican letter complaining that the Energy Department was being too careful with loan guarantees for nuclear plants, he has lately filed a bill to increase scrutiny of taxpayer-financed renewable energy projects, but not non-renewable energy projects.

In other news, Obama delayed the dreaded Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline, which many greens believe would be the death-kneel to earth’s climate. Since TransCanada has already spent $1.7 billion delivering pipeline on flatbeds, they will now have to spend $1 million a day to store all that construction equipment for 18 months while everything is reviewed, meaning the company may just cut its loses and abandon the project. But this may just send producers to two new Enbridge pipelines that would connect Alberta’s oil sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast. Many people, including Ralph Nader, believes Obama only delayed the pipeline for the 2012 election and that he fully intends to approve it after he takes in all the donations from environmentalists. A more likely suggestion is that he just wants the problem to go away.

Of course, even without Keystone, we may have already passed the point of no return. Some of the latest estimates on how bad it’s going to get comes from a study from Inter-Research that “Current global warming appears anomalous in relation to the climate of the last 20,000 years.” Studies from MIT, NOAA, and the Hadley Center all predict 9 to 11 °F increase in temperature by 2100, with sea levels rising between 1.3 and 2 meters, the fastest sea-level rise in 2000 years. Kansas is expected to <a href="register above 90 °F some 120 days a year.

According to a report by the IEA, we are about five years away from buying enough carbon-spewing factories that we will essentially be “locked in” to the point of no return. For every investment dollar in clean technology that is avoided before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent afterwards to compensate for the increased emissions.

And while Conservatives have long demanded that presidents should never dictate to their military commanders when they should end a war, no matter how many years it takes, the Republican congress is ignoring Pentagon requests that the military move away from fossil fuels since “dependence on those types of fuels degrades our national security, negatively impacts our economy, and harms the environment.”

The CIA has also been keeping track the national security aspects of climate change, but for some reason their research has been classified.

They aren’t the only ones censoring climate reports. Rick Perry also recently gutted a report on sea level rise in Galveston Bay, removing all mentions of climate change. The report was delayed as scientists tried to compromise with Perry, removing references to the IPCC and avoided mentioning that humans were causing the climate change, but ultimately the author and co-editor asked to have their names removed due to factually inaccuracies.

Of course, the third department of government that Perry that he wanted to get rid of, which he forgot during the debate, was the Energy Department. Trying to capi­tal­ize on his blunder, the Perry campaign last night e-mailed supporters encouraging them to vote in an online poll to select the federal agencies they’d most like to eliminate,” and to, I shit you not, “Send your answer to forgetmenot@rickperry.org, and if you are on twitter join us in using a new twitter hashtag: #forgetmenot.” As Ezra Klein says, “I bet he couldn’t tell you how he would do it,” since it would mean moving around the Census Bureau, the Patent and trademark Office, the National Nuclear Security Administration, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. His claims that he could dismantle the EPA are also bunk. And of course all these “conservative credentials” never stopped him from supporting farm subsidies since he’s taken in $80,000 from them.

Before 2008, calling for large numbers of government departments would only have been appealing to certain Libertarians. But following the shock doctrine of the economic criss, the increasing intensity and radicalization of the right have brought them to increasingly reject empirical reality and “adopt stances of unshakeable ideological opposition to anything the non-right does, even policies they have supported in the past.”

Rush Limbaugh is claiming that government listings of the heat index are manufactured and that even conservative news site creator Matt Drudge was being “sucked in.”

Republican congressman James Inhofe also made the news last April when airport manager Marshall Reece referred to him, saying: “I’ve got over 50 years flying, three tours of Vietnam, and I can assure you I have never seen such a reckless disregard for human life in my life.”

If only Reece knew how instrumental Inhofe’s climate denial will turn out to be for human civilization.

But this in particular was in reference to the fact that Inhofe had driven his twin-engine on the runway and then ‘sky hopped’ over the six vehicles and personnel working on the runway before landing. Sidney Boyd, who was supervising construction, said that the dangerous stunt “scared the crap out of” the workers he “skyhopped” over and that he “damn near hit” a red truck. “I think he actually wet his britches, he was scared to death. I mean, hell, he started trying to head for the side of the runway. The pilot could see him, or he should have been able to, he was right on him.” But rather than feeling embarrassment at risking the lives of airport workers, Inhofe came out of the plane acting uppity. “He come over here and started being like, ‘What the hell is this? I was supposed to have unlimited airspace.’”

Yet Inhofe did something no other congressman has dared to do: say that Rush Limbaugh was wrong about something. When Rush criticized Obama for sending troops to help Uganda fight the marauding Lord’s Resistance Army, saying that they were Christian warriors “fighting the Muslims in Sudan,” Inhofe, who often travels to Uganda, politely called Rush out on the House floor, saying that his “good friend” had made a mistake in calling them Christian. Inhofe pointed out that the Catholic Church had disavowed them and listed many of their atrocities, after which, Rush, for the first time in his life as far as I know, admitted he was wrong and laughed it off by saying he was happy to have his name entered into the Congressional record.

New propaganda at corporatist bile mills continues to pump oxygen into the Conservative media bubble. Conservative blogger Matt Ridley, in an article for “New Geography,” lambasted wind energy, complaining about their size and bulk as if your source of electricity was within “view from your house.” Continuing on, he writes:

Unpersuaded? Wind turbines slice thousands of birds of prey in half every year, including white-tailed eagles in Norway, golden eagles in California, wedge-tailed eagles in Tasmania. There’s a video on YouTube of one winging a griffon vulture in Crete. According to a study in Pennsylvania, a wind farm with eight turbines would kill about a 200 bats a year. The pressure wave from the passing blade just implodes the little creatures’ lungs. You and I can go to jail for harming bats or eagles; wind companies are immune.

We’re facing a crisis causing millions in East Africa to slowly starve to death because of all the carbon we’ve dumped into the atmosphere, but let’s shed tears for some birds and bats. Funny how I don’t remember Conservatives whining about the thousands of birds and hundreds of turtles and other mammals that died from BP’s oil spill. Wind turbines kill about 100 times less birds than buildings, cars, communication towers, power lines, or cats. The Daily Show pointed out that even duck hunters are trying to stop wind power because they thought the wind turbines were killing the ducks before they could.

The gas well requires no subsidy – in fact it pays a hefty tax to the government – whereas the wind turbines each cost you a substantial add-on to your electricity bill, part of which goes to the rich landowner whose land they stand on. Wind power costs three times as much as gas-fired power. Make that nine times if the wind farm is offshore. And that’s assuming the cost of decommissioning the wind farm is left to your children – few will last 25 years.

First off, according to Politifact, onshore wind is cheaper than coal, nuclear, and conventional natural gas, though plants with an “Advanced Combined Cycle” are cheaper still. Offshore wind is not even twice as expensive as conventional natural gas.

And what is this about no subsidies for oil and gas? It’s true they don’t require taxpayer money to be profitable, but that’s different than whether they are subsidized for no good reason. They are.

Ron Paul’s idea that no energy, dirty or clean, should be subsidized is also unrealistic. There has never been an energy industry in history that was not subsidized by the government. But it’s certainly more an ironic flavor of outrage that the dirty energy that is destroying the climate is even today still being given free money despite being the most profitable corporations on the planet.

Yet Conservatives who are always talking about spending cuts never complain about them. Often they are dismissed as not being “real” subsidies because the companies get them in the form of tax cuts, but a tax cut is when everyone gets a cut. When the government gives money to one group, that’s a gift regardless of whether it’s taken out directly or out of their taxes. Comparing a subsidy report from the EIA to the 2010 budget puts this in perspective:

DIRTY ENERGY
Biomass: $114 million
Oil & Nat. Gas: $654 million
Coal: $1.189 billion
2010 TOTAL: 2.572 billion

CLEAN ENERGY
Geothermal: 200 million
Hydro: 215 million
Solar: 968 million
Nuclear: 2.499 billion
Wind: 4.986 billion
2010 TOTAL: 8.868 billion

EPA: $10.5 billion
Dept. of Interior: $12 billion
NASA: $19 billion
Dept. of Justice: $24 billion
Dept. of Agriculture: $26 billion
Homeland Security: $43 billion
Dept. of Transportation: $73 billion
Dept. of Health/Human Services: $79 billion
Interest on National Debt: $164 billion
Medicaid: $290 billion
Medicare: $453 billion
Dept. of Defense: $664 billion
Total cost of War on Terror: $3.2 – $4 trillion

[Update: The Christian Science Monitor gives some very different numbers, saying that oil and coal take in far more in subsidies.]

Funny how Republicans always pick the smallest things on the list to complain about. “Last year’s federal budget included more than $200 million in funding for the Office of Personnel Management,” writes the Onion. “Since nobody really knows what that is, we suggest that money perhaps be spent making sure the oceans don’t turn into acid.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists have complained about the report, arguing that by using a “snapshot” of only one year, “the agency failed to count the massive federal subsidies that the fossil fuel and nuclear industries have enjoyed for decades—benefits they presumably will continue to receive unless Congress acts to limit them. Conversely, relatively new subsidies for wind and other renewables will only last for a finite period—10 years—after those facilities begin operation.”

In other words, if you took all that money that has been given to dirty energy over the years and used that amount to subsidize clean energy now, then it would be fair, that is, ignoring the fact that dirty energy is destroying the planet and clean energy needs to be funded to save it. But even ignoring that, dirty energy has still gotten more money over the years.

On this point, I was asked by a relative of mine, “What is fair? If a wife gets beat up by her husband and leaves him for another man, and he feels its only fair that he gets to beat her too. Is that fair? Huh?”

If you hit a woman 3000 times, and are still hitting her, and then keep complaining about me hitting a woman 8 times, then your problem is psychological.

Also, my punches are CPR.

He then complained about my use of the terms “dirty” and “clean” energy: “What is it about dirty energy that makes it dirty and kills so many people? Is CO2 dirty? Only in the liberal lexicon can something that is odorless, colorless and invisible be deemed ‘dirty’”

It’s true that “clean” and “dirty” are poor descriptions for our energy use. They should be referred to as “life-saving” and “suicide-holocaust-by-planetary-desertification-inducing.”

I pointed to a Wall Street Journal article that detailed research showing that the carbon in tailpipe exhaust which had long been implicated in heart disease, cancer and respiratory ailments might also injure brain cells and synapses key to learning and memory.

The response to this was “CO2 is not a pollutant…it is as essential as O2 and H2O for life on earth.” I replied with the definition of a pollutant but he only continued: “how does this relate to CO2? the air and soil are made up partially of CO2, without which air and soil would not even exist and neither would life on earth.” So I pointed out that the air is 78% nitrogen, which is also invisible, odorless, and important to life, but that if nitrogen was not a pollutant, that would mean the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, caused by the eutrophication of nitrogen from fertilizer, is not caused by pollution.

After a while, I got this response:

“So fertilizer is pollution?
We fertilize our crops with pollution?
You are misapplying the word pollution.
Under your definition everything can a pollutant.”

Of course, it wasn’t my definition. It was dictionary definition. I responded: “Right. Anything CAN be a pollutant, if it harms the natural resource. The definition of pollution is ‘any substance, as certain chemicals or waste products, that renders the air, soil,water, or other natural resource harmful or unsuitable for a specific purpose.’”

But I guess even getting him to admit that fossil fuels are getting subsidies is small victory. A year ago he wouldn’t even admit that energy companies were funding climate denial. Being in the oil information industry, he was convinced that since oil companies want oil to be more expensive, they were on the side of climate change alarmism.

I asked if he really thought this is hurting them financially, then why do you think they’re doing it? Is it just some coincidence that Koch Industries just happened to spend almost $25 million on “organizations of the ‘climate denial machine’” between 2005 and 2008? Was it a coincidence that the Koch-funded Cato Institute took in $11 million while propagandizing against climate change or that Koch Industries funded opposition to the Cape Wind offshore project? Was it also a coincidence that Texas oil giants Valero and Tesoro spent two-thirds of the $3 million used to fight the California climate bill?

He said that higher oil prices help producers like OPEC but hurts refiners like Koch and chemical companies because they have to pay more for raw material (oil) to make their products and “Obama’s cap-and-trade gave them no credits (subsidies) like they showered on the utilities to get them to go along with the scheme.” He also asked me to explain “why BP, ConocoPhillips and Chevron, each 10 times bigger than Koch, are FOR global warming legislation.”

Actually, ConocoPhillips and Chevron make about twice as much revenue as Koch Industries, and BP makes about three times as much, but for each of those the profits go to shareholders while Koch is the second largest privately-owned company in the world. Koch spent $12.3 million on lobbyists in 2009, ranking it fifth behind Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and BP PLC.

And I think that oil companies are a lot more fearful of their main product being drastically cut if renewable energy took hold than whatever extra profit they would take in from higher oil prices. He knows full well that extremely high oil prices affects how people commute to work and that OPEC ultimately lost money when they brought an oil embargo against the U.S. following the Yom Kippur War, which was brought on when Nixon and Israel refused to return control over the Sinai to Egypt. The Sinai was given back after the war, so the whole war and embargo was pointless and could have been avoided.

BP funded the midterm election campaigns of Tea Party candidates who deny the existence of global warming or oppose Barack Obama’s energy agenda.

Exxon, Shell, and BP were also part of the Global Climate Coalition, whose mission statement opposes the Kyoto Protocol.

BP and Shell are also part of the American Petroleum Institute which campaigned against Obama’s climate legislation. An email from the American Petroleum Institute outlines their plan to create the appearance of public opposition to Obama’s climate and energy reform by staging public events to give the appearance of a groundswell of public opinion against the legislation. A key lobbying group will bankroll and organize 20 ‘energy citizen’ rallies in 20 states. In an email obtained by Greenpeace, the president of the American Petroleum Institute outlined “sensitive” plan to stage events to put a “human face” on climate denial.

Exxon has been the slowest of the big oil majors to acknowledge climate change. In 2007, the board made a pledge that in 2008 they would “discontinue contributions to several public policy groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.” It broke that promise. The Rockefeller family, descendants of the original Standard Oil monopoly from the late 1800s which was broken up into 34 companies including Exxon and Mobil (now Exxon-Mobil), led a shareholder rebellion against their forefather’s creation in 2008 in order to change its funding of climate denial. It ultimately failed.

In response to this I was sent some of the contents of three different webpages:

1. An Indigo Ecology Paper from 1998 describing BP’s “break” with the oil industry over climate change

2. A 2007 newspaper article indicating that Conoco joined the U.S. Climate Action Partnership

3. A 2010 commercial from Conoco saying that they believe in climate change legislation referenced by a right-wing climate denier, Alex Jones, who thinks

This still left out Exxon and Shell which were the two companies he originally mentioned and these three points can be easily refuted:

The Indigo Ecology Paper is 13 years old and does not reflect BP’s attitude today. Since this report was written BP lobbied the Australian government not to sign the Kyoto Protocol unless the US did. In 2010, BP and Conocophillips left the U.S. Climate Action Partnership. In fact, the web page he copied it from has an update reading: “BP’s Deep Horizon Blowout demonstrates that the company culture reported on in this paper has drowned in deeply polluted water.”

So I’m not surprised he left that out.

As for the commercial, it’s a commercial. Here is what the CEO of Conoco really thinks:

“We must overcome the opposition of the ‘hydrocarbon deniers,’ “ Mulva said, playing off the term “climate deniers,” used to describe skeptics about climate science. Hydrocarbon deniers, he said, are those who “believe that renewable energy will quickly and easily replace hydrocarbons and cure all that ails us.”

Mulva, whose company supports mandatory U.S. regulation of greenhouse gases, said renewables cannot develop quickly enough to replace fossil fuels, and he predicted that even in 40 years, most electricity will not come from renewable sources.

“After all, there are only so many places where massive development is economical and publicly acceptable,” Mulva said, “and only so much government funding to subsidize the renewable sources.”…

Mulva lambasted the administration’s proposals to terminate tax benefits on oil and gas. “Perhaps it has not learned that if you tax something you get less of it,” he said. “Less supply security, fewer jobs and lower reinvestment.”…

Wind and solar have problems with “cost, reliability, visual impact, land and water use, bird strikes and massive power-line rights of way,” Mulva said. Biofuels, he said, require large amounts of land and water, can drive up food prices and increase greenhouse gas emissions.

So oil extraction and refining are completely benign? What Mulva really wants is endless subsidies for fossil fuels that already dominate the market, but there’s only so much money for stopping our destruction of the climate. The point of having a price on carbon is so you don’t need endless subsidies.

The last complaint I got was that “liberal institutes that George Soros and Ted Turner and their ilk fund is OK, I guess.” In fact, yes, it is all right for George Soros and Ted Turner to fund liberal causes because neither of them are funding ideologies that support the sell of the product they are making millions off of.

Jon Monbiot points to three case studies to illustrate how the climate denial industry is duping the public:

The first case study I’ve posted reveals how a coalition of US coal companies sought to persuade people that the science is uncertain. It listed the two social groups it was trying to reach – “Target 1: Older, less educated males”; “Target 2: Younger, lower income women” – and the methods by which it would reach them. One of its findings was that “members of the public feel more confident expressing opinions on others’ motivations and tactics than they do expressing opinions on scientific issues”.

Remember this the next time you hear people claiming that climate scientists are only in it for the money, or that environmentalists are trying to create a communist world government: these ideas were devised and broadcast by energy companies. The people who inform me, apparently without irony, that “your article is an ad hominem attack, you four-eyed, big-nosed, commie sack of shit”, or “you scaremongers will destroy the entire world economy and take us back to the Stone Age”, are the unwitting recruits of campaigns they have never heard of.

The second case study reveals how Dr Patrick Michaels, one of a handful of climate change deniers with a qualification in climate science, has been lavishly paid by companies seeking to protect their profits from burning coal. As far as I can discover, none of the media outlets who use him as a commentator – including the Guardian – has disclosed this interest at the time of his appearance. Michaels is one of many people commenting on climate change who presents himself as an independent expert while being secretly paid for his services by fossil fuel companies.

The third example shows how a list published by the Heartland Institute (which has been sponsored by oil company Exxon) of 500 scientists “whose research contradicts man-made global warming scares” turns out to be nothing of the kind: as soon as these scientists found out what the institute was saying about them, many angrily demanded that their names be removed. Twenty months later, they are still on the list. The fourth example shows how, during the Bush presidency, White House officials worked with oil companies to remove regulators they didn’t like and to doctor official documents about climate change.

In Climate Cover-Up, in Ross Gelbspan’s books The Heat is On and Boiling Point, in my book Heat, and on the websites DeSmogBlog.com and exxonsecrets.org, you can find dozens of such examples. Together they expose a systematic, well-funded campaign to con the public. To judge by the comments you can read on this paper’s website, it has worked.

But people behind these campaigns know that their claims are untrue. One of the biggest was run by the Global Climate Coalition, which represented ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, the American Petroleum Institute and several big motor manufacturers. In 1995 the coalition’s own scientists reported that “the scientific basis for the greenhouse effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well-established and cannot be denied”. The coalition hid this finding from the public, and spent millions of dollars seeking to persuade people that the opposite was true. (emphasis mine)

According to a congressional investigation, The American Coalition for Clean Coal waited until several weeks after a major House vote on climate legislation in 2009 to let lawmakers know that letters sent to House lawmakers in the days before the vote opposing the bill which purported to be from minority and senior citizen groups concerned about the legislation were fraudulent. The letters were sent to several politically vulnerable.

Fox news personalities even admit on air that they are more interested in changing the response to climate change based on psychological tricks. Last year, the Daily Beast reported on a memo by Fox News VP and Washington Managing Editor Bill Sammon, on October 27, 2009, advising all on-air personalities to “use the term ‘government-run health insurance,’ or, when brevity is a concern, ‘government option,’ whenever possible.” The memo followed an on-air conversation between Frank Luntz telling Sean Hannity that “If you call it a public option, the American people are split,” but “If you call it the government option, the public is overwhelmingly against it,” to which Hannity replied that he made a great point and that “from now on, I’m going to call it the government option, because that’s what it is.”

Back in February, Fox News columnist Gene Kaprowski put a memo asking for sources, reading: “Former Vice President Al Gore told Bill O’Reilly that: “A rise in global temperature can create all sorts of havoc, ranging from hotter dry spells to colder winters, along with increasingly violent storms, flooding, forest fires and loss of endangered species.” We need comments from someone who can point out the ridiculousness of his argument, even if you accept the somewhat-implausible argument.” (emphasis mine)

Koprowski here is openly asking for sources to feed him his own quotations to make an argument they know is false.

I often wonder if Al Gore’s involvement in the climate change debate has helped or hurt the chances of something being done about climate change. The topic needed someone to bring to spotlight to it, and Gore’s movie certainly got people talking about it. But it also helped polarize the argument: If the Democratic Vice President says global warming is real then it must be a hoax! Conservatives kind of have a point when they point out that despite his heavy use of solar panels, his mansion still boasted 12 times the national average. But far more unforgivable was Gore’s admission that his support for corn ethanol subsidies that contributed to a food price crisis was borne out of a political interest to appease corn farmers in Tennessee. How is anyone supposed to trust him on what he is saying about climate change after that?

Robert Bryce, who left the Institute for Energy Research in 2008 over ideological issues and is now a Senior Fellow at the Manhatten Institute Conservative think tank wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal arguing that since neutrinos at the CERN institute might have gone faster than the speed of light, then “there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth’s atmosphere.” FrumForum’s Kenneth Silber admirably rebutted him, pointing out that even if the neutrino finding is confirmed (a possibility that is looking smaller and smaller), then “one can expect relativity would be subsumed into some larger theoretical picture (much as Newtonian physics was) rather than just thrown away. Certainly the finding will not mean that all data having to do with relativity — for example, the fact that nuclear power plants work — get overturned.”

Fox News also came out with an article claiming that many of the people writing the IPCC are not actually experts in their field, saying: “Grad students often co-author scientific papers to help with the laborious task of writing. Such papers are rarely the cornerstone for trillions of dollars worth of government climate funding, however — nor do they win Nobel Peace prizes. But out of 1250 authors of the 2007 report, Fox only named one who was a grad student. The article claimed that Jonathan Patz was a grad student when he worked on the 1994 report, but in fact he was a Doctor of Occupational and Environmetnal Medicine. Richard Klein was also a grad student but he only helped author a Special Report, not a Major Assessment Report. Lisa Alexander was a grad student as well, but she was only a contributor, not a lead author.

Conservative ads are getting pretty crazy. Joe Romm describes the latest anti-EPA ad as something the local middle-school AV club were to asked to make something along the lines of “‘Tomb Raider 4? meets ‘Night of the Living Dead’ meets ‘Lord of the Rings’ meets ‘Star Wars’ meets ‘Fox News.’”

But the news item that has really been making the rounds is the fact that an independent study led by climate skeptic Richard Muller and funded by Libertarian think tank founders, the Koch Brothers, proved Muller’s previous skepticism wrong. Muller’s team from Berkeley confirmed that the effect of urban heating on the global trends have a negligible effect on the increased warming over the last century. Skeptic Anthony Watts promised that he was “prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong,” but then quickly back-flipped from that position once he heard that Muller’s findings were already completely in line with the existing data even when only 2% of the data had been processed. Watts’ complaint was that Muller’s team reaching a conclusion with only 2% of the data proved that they had come to a predetermined conclusion.

Of course, Conservatives went right to work on Muller. In an article called, “Lying, cheating climate scientists caught lying, cheating again,” James Delingpole says that he had “doubts about Muller’s findings from the start” and that “there is little evidence of him ever having been one,” making the implication that no one from liberal Berkeley could possibly be a climate skeptic.

Despite what Dinglepole thinks, but there is plenty of evidence that Muller was a skeptic. Muller has called other skeptics like Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre “hero[es]“ of his. McIntyre, by the way, recently tried to link the recent rape scandal at Penn State to the university’s climate science department, saying “It’s hard not to transpose the conclusions of the Penn State Climategate “investigation” into Penn State’s attitude towards misconduct charges in their profitable football program.” Watts backed McIntyre up, saying: “Steve McIntyre writes about what many of us have been thinking about Penn State’s failures at investigating its own, such as the appearance of a whitewash investigation done about Dr. Michael Mann and Climategate.”

And what did Muller think of the vindicated “Climategate”? “It felt like a woman who’s just learned her husband was cheating on her.”

In fact, Muller was so upset about scientists at NOAA being vindicated from “Climategate” that he is quoted in a Heritage Foundation article, “The Left’s War on Science,” as saying:

What they did is the took the data form 1961 on, from this peak, and erased it. What was their justification for erasing it? The fact that it went down… This justification would not have survived peer review in any journal that I am willing to publish in… And what is the result in my mind? Quite frankly as a scientist, I now have a list of people whose papers I won’t read anymore. You’re not allowed to do this in science. This is not up to our standards.

That’s an article I just a happened upon, unconnected to the recent interest surrounding Muller, proving once again that the denier bench is low indeed.

And here’s an article where Muller incorrectly blames China, claims clouds cause three times as much of the global warming as the IPCC claims, denies that hurricanes are getting stronger, and talks about geoengineering the earth’s climate as if that isn’t a desperate move of last resort.

“I certainly feel that there is lots of room for skepticism on the human component of warming,” Muller said.

What more could skeptics want? Does he have to believe the sun is carried across the sky on a chariot by Apollo?

Oh yeah, and Muller also runs a consulting company, Muller & Associates, which advises energy companies in areas that include “enhanced oil recovery and underground coal gasification.”

So it’s probably no surprise that Muller has given discordant explanations in subsequent interviews, saying on one hand that “we are dumping enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that we’re working in a dangerous realm, I realm where I think, we may really have trouble in the next coming decades,” but on the other hand, was quoted as saying that for the earth as a whole, “we don’t know that it’s warming. It may be constant, we don’t know.” He may have been quoted out of context since Joe Romm was also in that article, or he could just be a moron. The fact that he wrote a book on the crank theory that the dinosaurs were killed by a “death star” that revolves around the sun every 26 million years supports the latter theory. It may be common for deniers to subscribe to crank theories. S. Fred Singer believed we could tow one of Mars’ moons back to Earth in the ’60s and Christopher Monckton, who has been asked by the House of Lords to stop calling himself a Lord, is a birther.

Dingbatpole continues:

“Note how the 10 year trend from 2001 to 2010 – in flat contradiction of Muller’s claims – shows no warming whatsoever. What’s odd that BEST appears to have gone to great trouble – shades of “hide the decline”, anyone? – to disguise this inconvenient truth. Here is a graph released by BEST.”

Ahhhh… they never get tired of “hide the decline.” Never mind that the “hiding” was a reference to a graph on tree rings not to any hidden data about overall climate.

Can he find one scientist that will back up this claim? No, of course not. Because in his world all scientists are liars. Only people who don’t know crap about statistics can tell you what a statistical increase or decrease is.

You can’t measure the average climate change in 5 or 10 years because, by definition, climate is the average world temperature over a minimum of 30 years. Here’s a graph showing how skeptics take 200 years of incontrovertible warming and parse it into six short-term “declines” simply by cherry-picking the start and end dates. If you work with a short enough window, you can prove anything.

Dingalingpole continues: “The data is then smoothed using a ten year average which is ideally suited to removing the past five years of the past decade and mix the earlier standstill years with years when there was an increase.”

To claim that it has cooled in the last five years after the world experienced its hottest year, decade and century in 2010 shows an amazing amount of self delusion. Nineteen countries set new heat index records, including Pakistan hitting 126.

Things are so warped in the minds of Conservatives that they can not even admit that climate science is really science. The word “science” is too strong a concept to give up on. Maybe if we didn’t live in the 21st century with cellphones, computers, etc., then it would be easier to openly criticize scientists since 97% of all them (not just climate scientists) accept man-made climate change. Some Conservatives like Gerald Warner do openly ridicule the entire profession, belittling them as “pointy-heads in lab coats” who “have reassumed the role of mad cranks they enjoyed from the days of Frankenstein to boys’ comics in the 1950s.” Other Conservatives, like the Heritage Foundtion, pretend they are fighting scientists on behalf of science. Most Conservatives, however, instead try to appeal to low-information voters and instead attempt to outright deceive the general public into thinking that scientists agree with them.

Gary Gutting of the Washington Post goes a different route. While he admits that the vast majority of scientists accept man-made climate change, he attempts to compare the acceptance of expert opinion by non-experts with Plato’s argument that philosopher kings (or experts) are better at running the government than a democracy:

How can we, nonexperts, take account of expert opinion when it is relevant to decisions about public policy?

To answer this question, we need to reflect on the logic of appeals to the authority of experts. First of all, such appeals require a decision about who the experts on a given topic are. Until there is agreement about this, expert opinion can have no persuasive role in our discussions. Another requirement is that there be a consensus among the experts about points relevant to our discussion. Precisely because we are not experts, we are in no position to adjudicate disputes among those who are. Finally, given a consensus on a claim among recognized experts, we nonexperts have no basis for rejecting the truth of the claim.

By that logic, how can airline passengers trust pilots to fly airplanes correctly? Obviously, the airplane should be flown by having all the passengers vote on which buttons and levers should be pushed. Keep following these idiots and Plato’s belief that a democracy is unsustainable will proven correct for sure.

But really, that is the whole problem. Conservative psychology is not really interested in trying to derive the truth through expert opinion on that particular subject but instead adopts itself to a single hierarchical where the ultimate authority, be it the Bible or Fox News, determines all of aspects a unified truth shared by all its participants. In contrast to this, liberal psychology tends to focus not on unity but on being different and unique, even priding itself on being disorganized, as seen in Occupy Wall Street, which barely has more Liberals than Libertarians but whose causes were certainly dominated more by Progressivism than Conservativism, but emphatically denies being a “Liberal Tea Party.” This rebellious spirit causes the Left to become, as Chris Mooney puts it, “balkanized and in a completely different camp from those who are only half a political degree away from them on a 360 degree spectrum.”

But despite this, Liberals far more than Conservatives emphasize pacifism in their politics, though both sides of course know that using violence openly only hurts their position in the ongoing media narrative. Conservatives are certainly more open to the allowance of civilian deaths in the name of the War on Terror, although the election of Obama has brought a major shift in that narrative from concerns over Bush’s encroachment of civil rights to crediting Obama for success in increasing the military authority of the executive branch.

I often wonder if climate change was as important an issue with the Left as social or economic issues if eco-terrorism would play a larger role in subverting carbon production. There have been so many wars over the centuries that, while instrumental to the way some things turned out, ultimately had no large effect on the world as a whole, and yet all people can seem to do when faced with a perpetual world holocaust can only sit around desks and disagree with each other about what plans they will do to stop it.

There was the eco-terrorist James Lee, who was shot dead a year ago after holding up the Discovery Channel Headquarters in order to force them to air a television show urging people not to have babies. He claimed to have been inspired by An Inconvenient Truth, but he also hated immigrants and referred to them as trash. Obviously, he was deranged and simply didn’t realize that he was hurting his cause, which itself was fruitless. We can’t convince the world to stop having babies.

But perhaps after the desertification of the planet causes food prices to soar, there might actually be large groups of Weather Underground-like eco-terrorists who will try more direct measures like blowing up oil pipelines or bombing coal plants. I’ve always had respect for the groups who sabotage the equipment of the crews tearing down the rainforest. Unlike most people, who typically give their lives to support the power structure of the nations they were accidentally born in, the saboteurs fought for a cause transcending the divisions of race, nation, and religion to being about a better future for all of mankind, ever since I was first told by my young 6th grade Catholic school homeroom teacher Miss Singleton about how those involved worked in cels that would refuse to give any information about other saboteurs. Nevertheless, by the time the concept of the futuristic eco-terrorist hero was introduced by the video game Final Fantasy VII in 1997, the lameness of Captain Planet had made the idea seemed rather blase. But that was the 90s. Today the concept seems more prescient.

If the dream of going back in time to assassinate Hitler has become a cliche, then will Dick Cheney and James Inhofe become just as reviled? Future governments seeking to mitigate public anger at continuing carbon outputs may excavate Michael Crichton’s body in order to burn it like a heretic to the 15th-century Church, only to excuse their own carbon emissions because of the far more pressing existential threats brought upon by climate-caused wars. Unlike those assholes in the past, those conflicts will be considered “real wars,” not the vanity wars of the early 21st century.

If one really believes the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, then destruction of the energy plants that originally led to the modern scientific revolution, ultimately saving millions of lives, may be the only truly moral decision to save the lives of billions.

Obviously, I’d rather just see them retired as we moved on to cleaner energy, and this is not really a concept I would even like to entertain if anyone read or cared about this blog, but it does keep me wondering if every American today will be ultimately responsible for more deaths than any of the totalitarian dictators of the 20th century.